That powerful and obnoxious odor of bullshit you may have noticed in the air? That’s just Camille Paglia, evidently aiming for a bit of a comeback.
One of the first-generation of antifeminist feminists who came to public attention in the 1990s, Paglia is less a scholar than an intellectual entertainer, astonishingly adept at generating controversy by packaging rather conventionally reactionary ideas as bold contrarianism. And then getting everyone to talk about her rather than the issues at hand.
If Paglia was feeling a little starved for attention, the short piece she published on Time.com yesterday (donotlink version here) with the portentous title “The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil” should fix that problem in a hurry. An appalling bit of rape apologia gussied up as a bold meditation on human evil, it’s already generating applause from Men’s Rights and Red Pill Redditors, The Daily Caller, and fellow antifeminist feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.
If you removed a brief swipe at conservatism and added some incoherent references to hypergamy and “whores,” it’s a piece that would fit right in on any “dark enlightenment” blog.
Paglia’s thesis is that female college students and campus administrators alike are, by focusing on the issue of rape, obsessing over the wrong kind of human evil.
Wildly overblown claims about an epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places: the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder.
You might think it makes sense to focus more on rape than on “the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder” because, well, rape is appallingly common on college campuses while kidnapping and murder, horrific as they are, are rare.
Paglia answers that obvious objection by simply redefining date rape as not-rape, essentially little more than a bit of sexual awkwardness stemming from inexperience and horniness.
Despite hysterical propaganda about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs) but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides.
Oh those blurred lines!
Having thus waved away the problem of date rape – and Time magazine’s own reporting on the subject – Paglia takes a swipe at those actually trying to do something about it:
Colleges should stick to academics and stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties.
As Paglia sees it, college students, professors and administrators have simply forgotten “what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” to borrow the famous catchphrase from a radio drama popular in Paglia’s youth, instead blaming the ills of the world on “racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade.”
Paglia, despite her earlier snide remarks about “hookup melodramas,” is no stranger to melodrama herself, and she ends the piece with what is essentially a pretentious, extremely long-winded restatement of the old cliché “boys will be boys.”
The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.
But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. …
The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey. …
Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.
So apparently, in Paglia’s mind, the only thing that can be done about this “evil that lurks in the hearts of men” is for young women to stop dressing like sluts.
In the end, it’s hard not to conclude that it is Paglia, not campus anti-rape activists, who misunderstands the nature of evil. By hand-waving away date rape and focusing attention instead on the comparatively very rare cases of strangers who stalk and murder young women – the “animal eyes glowing … in the dark,” it is Paglia who fails to see the potential for evil that lurks in the eyes of young men (and women) who look like everyone else.
One of the real accomplishments of the feminist movement of the past twenty years is that it has enabled us to see and take seriously the predatory sexual behavior – from sexual harassment to rape – that is inflicted on women (and men, and non-binary folks) by people they know and trust.
By pretending that date rape is little more than a kind of “ oafish hookup melodrama,” it’s Paglia who is not only blinding herself to human evil – but also helping to perpetuate it.
This whole thing reminds me of the arguments from the early 20th century about why women make better librarians than men: not because they were more “nurturing” or whatever, but because women would be less susceptible to corruption by “bad” books and could thus better defend the integrity of the library. Men, who cannot be expected to exercise judgment or self control, would inevitably lead to libraries full of pornography. This was obviously due to biological differences.
Pretty much the same as Paglia’s argument with a slightly different application.
If anyone wants to read the complete Ivins piece on Camille Paglia, it’s here.
In related good news, California now has the nation’s first “affirmative consent” law — in other news, “she was too drunk to care” and “she never said no” will no longer be valid legal defenses, at least for state college campuses.
I look forward the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and rending of garments from the MRAs.
Camille Paglia’s wrongness makes my head hurt.
proxieme: I think that, like everyone else, framing it as “There are some bad people out there who might try to do some bad things. One way that these bad people try to get others into a vulnerable position is alcohol or drugs.” By identifying it as something wrong that the predators do it takes the onus off them to “not get raped,” and also gives them some tools for identifying red flags.
I’m in the same boat as you. I have these two articles from the Yes Means Yes blog bookmarked for when my daughter is old enough to help me:
Meet the Predators
Predator Redux
“young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark.”
Yes, keep pretending that rapists are others… that they are some sort of monster that you can immediately spot by some set of tell-tale signs. Keep pretending that rapist only lurk in the shadows on streets, waiting to drag some poor woman off as she screams helplessly. I’m sure it makes all the men who had sex with some unconscious person or who didn’t stop when a partner said no feel so much better… because they aren’t a “monster” and they’ve never waited in a dark alley to kidnap a woman. They might have forced their way into a dorm room, buuuut they’ve never done that! Their cases clearly were never rape. They can wipe their brow and breath a sigh of relief.
I just like to pop in to say that Walter B. Gibson’s “Shadow” novels (the pulp stories on which the radio show was based) are fantastic and completely worth seeking out. Gibson certainly writes about evil with better prose style, believably, and moral decency than Camille Paglia.
Dammit, borked the last link. Try again:
Predator Redux
@Proxieme- I might also advise letting your daughters know that predators often start out with small boundary violations, to feel out if they can use societal conditioning to coerce their targets into things they don’t want to do. A guy who insists on buying someone a drink after they’ve said no might be planning on drugging it, but he might also be seeing if he can change a ‘no’ into a ‘yes’ by badgering and coercion.
These men who have made it clear that they do not accept refusals or lesser boundaries, like personal space and indications of discomfort, the ones who whine about ‘giving them a chance’, these men are dangerous. And no, it’s not supposed to be our responsibility to avoid people who will do us harm, but being able to recognize these dickbags and shut them down and warn everyone else about them puts a severe crimp in their style and I’m all for making the lives of predators harder.
Proxieme, you’re getting great advice here (I love Mammotheers), but I didn’t see anyone mention Gavin Becker’s The Gift of Fear. It’s kind of victim-blamey about IPV, and that’s not great, but other than that I found it really useful in doing realistic threat assessment. He also fully endorses women paying attention to our instincts over being polite or overly concerned about what others think. Women are constantly told to tend to other people’s feelings, and that can make us vulnerable to people who will use that against us.
A big one (that I’m sure you’re already doing) is modelling the idea that people are allowed to draw boundaries. So, for example, if your kid doesn’t want to go kiss some family friend hello? Don’t make them. If someone is tickling them and the kid is screaming stop, then that person needs to stop, What are they seeing from the adults around them? If they’re seeing women and girls drawing boundaries and having them respected, then they’re learning that as the expected norm. If they’re constantly seeing the boundaries of women and girls ignored or disrespected then that’s telling them something too.
Not that it’s not great to actively talk to your kids about this stuff, but I think the process of them learning how boundaries works starts really early, and the stuff they see and experience may have a greater impact than anything anyone says. And if you’ve already laid the groundwork in childhood in terms of reinforcing their sense that they get to have boundaries (for example, by responding to childhood incidents where boys were being pushy and weird with them by supporting their sense that that’s wrong and that they have a right not to like it and to object when it happens) then those adolescent conversations tend to be pretty easy, since you’re just building on what’s already there.
What did Cliff Pervocracy call it when he used to hang around here? “Slavering Beast Theory”?
Or Sex Werewolf – something like that. He has a post about it on his blog from then.
Wow, Paglia sure packed a whole lot of unsubstatiated claims into that one sentence.
He hunts the wild tundra of the campus? Yeah, that doesn’t sound stupid at all.
Odd, the only picture I can recall of Paglia is one where she’s posed in a push-up bra, standing between two burly young blokes and shoving her boobs and her sneer into the camera. Hypocrite much?
Too late. And I know how armour goes on and comes off, too. 😉
I’m assuming Pagila isn’t a criminologist. She should stop talking about these things like she’s an expert on them, when she probably doesn’t know anything about criminology.
I’m particularly revolted by her throwaway use of the term ‘psychotic’, psychosis and rape have nothing to do with each other! Psychotic people are statistically less likely to be violent than the general population and more likely to be victims of violence. In a scenario involving rape, the one most likely to be struggling with psychosis is actually the victim.
Before I started following this blog, I haven’t heard someone non-ironically reference the phrase “you go, girl!” in decades. Paglia is the umpteenth anti-feminist I’ve heard claim that this is some sort of key contemporary feminist slogan that they’re cleverly debunking. I wish I kept a list of other examples, because I’m stunned how many anti-feminists complain how feminists are brainwashing, if not ruining, young women by encouraging them with that phrase.
I get that they want to demonize any effort to encourage girls and teens, painting it as a disasterous feminist plot that is creating an army of deluded, narcissistic young American women. That doesn’t change the fact that their fixation on “you go, girl”, as well as “girl power”, is just goofy.
I like how the ‘you go girl’ sentence is phrased so that it is quite telling of how angry she is at “modern girls” being raised as if they can have agency and dreams and freedom.
Also, do these people so concerned about men’s rights and welfare also think that (prison and non-prison) rapes to men are also a result of hookup melodramas and mixed signals if they don’t happen in dark alleys?
Yep, she did – remember them even quoting it in an episode of American Dad! one time, too.
And also, yes, it is incredibly hypocritical of her. Why it is she is admonishing young women who, God forbid, want to go out and enjoy themselves while making women who sell their bodies (to some extent) somehow deserve glorification is beyond me. I mean, she seems to forget that strip clubs do – in fact – have rules of conduct for customers and those who try grabbing them or harassing them in some way is thrown out by a bouncer (sometimes even call the police). So, what, are frat houses somehow an exception and don’t need to follow any code of conducts themselves? Because they’re suppose to and you’d think it would apply to anyone who goes to one of their parties…but they don’t.
Kind of reminds me of that whole scandal with Herman Cain during the last presidential election: he is accused of sexually assaulting several women, and the response to such claims are completely dismissive – yet the moment a sex worker admits that, yes, he’s having extramarital affairs and implied those accusations were true is the where everyone finally listens.
They want to have their cake and eat it too, as the saying goes.
They want to feel superior to the “weaker sex” while at the same time denying their shitty behavior whenever it is called out on. It’s why they’ll pride themselves on dominating STEM fields under the delusion it is all due to their MANLY LOGIC but, when acting like a complete creep to a woman, they’ll self-victimize and act as if the woman was in the wrong for “tricking” him with her feminine wiles.
The thing to remember about Paglia is that she’s not interested in critical thinking. She wouldn’t know a rational argument if one bit her on the butt and called her Trixie.
I haven’t read this Time piece, but I know her usual schtick. She plays at being an intellectual by recycling long-discredited tropes (preferably Freudian) and throwing in erudite cultural references (a nice fashionable pomo mix of “high” and pop culture). Voila: the people who buy her bullshit think she’s smart, and since they read her, they must be too.
Brooked: Wow, Paglia sure packed a whole lot of unsubstatiated claims into that one sentence.
That’s what she does.
She is a Randian.
One thing I like about this argument is that it’s like central to libertarianism: WE ARE JUST BORN THE WAY WE ARE. You need that in order to make the case that there’s just some people born better than other people, and so it’s fair that the former group wins and the latter group loses.
But this belief then becomes about HATING HOW LIBERALS KEEP SAYING THAT EVERYONE IS BORN EQUAL AND THAT CONTEXT MATTERS MORE. So they dig their heels in: EVERYING is immutable nature!
So now they’re reduced to seriously talking about how some people are just Born Evil, and how darkness lurks in our bestial nature, and they’re saying the exact same things that their sworn enemies, religious people, do.
Most people who go by the label of “libertarian”, these days, are really just corporate feudalists. Replace dukes, barons, and lords with upper-management and CEOs and it makes sense – that, and the fact they push the notion a work force should be treated like serfs.