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.
#notalllibertarians?
Reblogged this on Dreams of the Shining Horizon and commented:
So. Camille Paglia said some stupid and cruel things about rape yesterday in a column that she wrote for Time. It’s what she does. But she also said some fairly stupid things about human evil.
You see, Camille subscribes to what an old internet friend of mine calls the Slavering Beast Theory, which states that predators (sexual and otherwise) are fundamentally different than normal people. Only purely evil, psychotic men commit rape – and they’re easy to recognize and avoid if feminism hasn’t trained you to be too confident.
In answer, I’d like to tell you a story. My first-year dorm at St. Lawrence University held 45 people of both sexes. Four of the women were raped at some point in our first year. Two of them – one who was raped by her boyfriend and another by a long-time friend – would probably be dismissed by Camille as “oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both sides”. She would be wrong and evil to do so, but I’m sure she would.
But then there were the other two, both raped by the same frat boy. And it would count as rape, even by Camille’s definition, since roofies were involved.
I met the guy. He was no slavering beast. He was handsome and charming. He was not a fucking orc.
We all wish that bad things were only done by bad people who are easy to recognize because of their badness. But a woman of 67 should know by now that it’s not true.
It fucking kills me how hard they fail at biology. Even IF there were deep, hard-wired differences between the sexes, they’d still be malleable. It’s called fucking evolution, and if we, as a species, decide to work on changing something, guess what? It fucking changes!
The extent to which the consciousness and intentions of the organisms involved in sexual selection affects the outcome is consistently ignored by these fucking asshats.
Paglia has been reheating her very wrong-headed cabbage about rape and serving it up for almost 30 years now. It’s time for a new schtick.
As others have observed, it is a contradictory and ultimately profoundly anti-male (one could even say misandrist, if one were so inclined) piece, but not without a grain of truth about the nature of human evil perpetrated by men. It is therefore surprising that MRA and their ilk so enthusiastically embrace it.
Or rather it would be surprising if MRA were capable of logic and objectivity, and not looking for any chance to minimize the issue of acquaintance rape and blame women for violence inflicted on them.
I suspect if someone other than Paglia — say, Amanda Marcotte — wrote a similar piece warning women about the evil lurking in men’s hearts (and in their glow-in-the-dark eyes), she would be pilloried without end by MRA and their bedfellows. But Paglia gets a pass because apparently scoring points against feminists is even more important than pointing out her bleak stance on the nature of male evil.
@ ikanreed:
‘The “It’s not rape, because it’s not pure evil” mentality is one that appeals to too many people.’
Yes.
I think women would have a much better chance of spotting “the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark” if people like Paglia would stop telling that their friends, dates, and acquaintances couldn’t possibly be rapists, because the are Good Guys.
It’s like if women don’t limit their lives as much as possible (no drinking in public, no walking alone at night, no wearing “slutty” clothes, whatever those are) they are to blame for their rape. However, women aren’t allowed to take any steps to prevent being raped that may hurt a man’s feelings, like upholding their personal boundaries or avoiding specific men who set off their alarm bells. Unless they get raped, in which case it either wasn’t rape because it wasn’t a stranger in the bushes, or it was all her fault anyway.
Honestly, I kind of feel like all this rape-culture bullshit is just society-wide gaslighting.
Who was it who talked about how Reddit is basically a feudal structure: The redditors are serfs and the mods are nobles who vie with each other and gain power by controlling bigger and more influential subreddits?
Shorter Idiotess: “Stranger danger booga booga booga! Nature red in tooth and claw! Slut-shaming cliché! Snorfblattergabblegabblehey!”
She’s peddling her sexual essentialism fables again. Yawn. Well, she hasn’t experienced book sales in over two or three decades. Back in the day, when she wanted publicity, she’d bash a well-known feminist or two then wait by her phone.
I haven’t bothered with any of her books; her Salon.com column got too stupid too fast for me. It all boiled down too easily to “I said it, that settles it, YOU’RE WRONG!” By the looks of things, I haven’t missed anything.
Uuuuugh, Paglia. Thank god I had Ivins to wash my mental mouth out with.
I like how she writes about date rape as though we have sex, feel bad, and then just magically change our minds. That’s not patronizing or condescending or wrongheaded at all! It’s true, I was curled up in the fetal position sobbing just to be contrary and ruin the dude’s orgasm. How on earth could he possibly have known I didn’t want to be there? How on earth could I possibly have expected him to give a fuck about my feelings?
It’s times like this if I didn’t have hubby, I would wish I were more ace.
Cassandra ninja’d me on this, but it’s worth repeating
Girls who are raised to respect other people’s boundaries (knocking on parents’ bedroom door, for instance) and whose boundaries are respected in turn – no forced tickling, hugging or kissing, or adults marching into bedrooms and bathrooms and other intrusive behaviour as they get older will be in a much better position to establish and maintain other boundaries as they get older.
One thing to watch out for as they get to be teens. They can get very black and white about what they think is right and wrong. Ours were violently opposed to drugs of any kind. We had to get very explicit and lay down the law a bit. We Did Not Care if any of their friends had been stupid or broken the law by taking drugs or underage drinking – even though they/we avoided unsupervised parties for such reasons. They should not hesitate to call an ambulance if anyone needed medical help. They should not go along with any of their friends trying to avoid dealing with hospitals or police and take such a person home to “sleep it off”. We’d back them up and help them (and any bone-headed friends) negotiate the consequences if that was needed.
Yours will have their own versions of these black and white attitudes as they move into the age group. You’ll find a way to deal with these things – just don’t be afraid to be scorned as “worrying too much”. They’ll still be absorbing the message that they can rely on you.
(But you shouldn’t burn any Paglia or other books if they get sucked into reading them for some reason. Talk it all through with them.)
And at the sight of that name, I delurk at last. I’d been wondering when you’d take Camille Paglia on directly. If there’s anybody I feel anxiety of influence (a big thing with her) toward, it’s Paglia and her hero Ayn Rand. In fact, I felt it right at the start, back in the ’90s, because I always despised her gender theory. Her shtick seemed radical back then, but that’s only because second-wave feminism had long since curdled into a rigid Stalinism, especially among “postmodern” academics. Paglia was the antithesis of Andrea Dworkin. But a lot can change in 20 years, yet she hasn’t changed one bit with the times; what looked radical and cool in the Clinton era, we now see as the warmed-over neoconservative sexual reactionism of her good buddies Warren Farrell and Christina Hoff Summers — “postmodern” neocon think-tankers.
I’m not surprised she’s now stooping to slut-shaming, but for a very special reason. You see, her theory of Romanticism combined in my mind with that of Morse Peckham, who posited five stages to Romanticism’s development. I knew as soon as I read him that Paglia’s brand of Romanticism is the fifth and last of his stages, which he called Stylism. The hallmark of the Stylist is that they blaze onto the scene early on and then, by not changing, decay into a parody of themselves. Peckham saw it in Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, and the English Decadent poet A.C. Swinburne; I see it in Frank Miller and, exactly as I predicted back around 1995, Camille Paglia. In fact, I saw her decay before my eyes in her Salon days of the late ’90s/early ’00s.
And so now she combines the slut-shaming she used to denounce with the above-linked Slavering Beast Theory, describing men in her Time piece as if they were the savagely animalistic dark-skinned creatures in Frank Frazetta fantasy paintings who were out to get the mostly or totally naked (and of course creamy-white-skinned) Princess in order to do Bad Things to her — the same Bad Things she’s trying to justify here through unjustified assertion and by invoking the Devil in the form of said creatures (“Deliver her to Moloch!”). Few feminists would claim men were such creatures, and they’re older and less relevant than she is.
And the other reason I’m not surprised is that the driving force of her personality has always been her all-consuming loathing of women more feminine than herself. They’ll always be Sandra Dee in her mind. Is it any wonder this hero-worshipper of that loathsome swine Rush Limbaugh inevitably went full-tilt MRA?
Society, liberalism, feminism, and even gay culture have changed a lot in 20 years, yet Paglia hasn’t. The Sixties seem to have returned in full force, yet she returns to oppose it in terms that were old in 1920. I grew up and she stays the same. I’ve knocked yet another ex-hero off the pedestal. In fact, I’ll inevitably go into battle against her myself; and to combine two of her favorite Decadent images from Sexual Personae, if she’s the raging Amazon Queen Penthesilea, I shall be the languid angel nonchalantly duelling Jacob.
Her 15 minutes were over by 2000. She’s the mirror-universe Catharine MacKinnon now, not that glamourous creature who was such a hit in the ’90s, especially among bitch-loving gay diva worshippers. I don’t think any amount of “Wild Italian” attention whoring can bring her back.
End of rant. If this is a bit tl;dr, it’s been a long time coming.
Camille Paglia gets called a feminist because she is loud, irrational, and obnoxious, and that is an anti-feminist definition of feminist. Anyone calling her a feminist is saying a lot more about themselves than about feminists.
I have to confess I’ve never been able to read her shit sandwiches, so I really can’t comment any further.
Goddess bless and keep you, Molly Ivins. You left us far too soon.
Also, any parent who didn’t warn their children about the dangers of getting drunk, including getting raped, would be criminally negligent. It is stupid and dangerous to ride in a car with someone who is driving drunk. but that doesn’t mean you deserve to die in an accident. Likewise it is stupid and dangerous to get drunk in certain situations, but that doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped.
The difficult part is that while we believe that our daughters should enjoy all the freedoms that our sons enjoy, we also understand that in the world as it actually exists certain types of behavior will expose young women to greater risk. The delicate part is how to make them aware of the dangers without implying that if something bad happens they are to blame. Obviously it would be better if everyone did a fantastic job of educating their sons properly, but that does not seem to have happened yet.
If you do some research you will find that the corporate media has been paying anti feminists to write these boilerplate articles for regular publication since before we got the effing vote. Opting out of the workforce and going to college to get the MRS and on an on. I don’t think a month goes by without the republishing of the same propaganda they were selling to our grandmas.
“Men have needs” is the 1920 version of this one.
Molly Ivins was an incredible combination of intelligence, guts, humor, and commonsense. Hemiongway once said, “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector.” Molly had about the best shit detector ever.
RE:proxieme
I have young girls as well. My advice is to start teaching them the basic lessons NOW. Don’t wait until they’re old enough to be out with their friends drinking.
I generally stay away from stranger-danger, as it doesn’t really work. For one thing, most strangers are nice, and young kids often either don’t internalize what a stranger is (they think that strangers are only people that “look” scary) or they internalize it to such a point that they hide from firefighters looking for them inside of a burning building. (Yes this really has happened, and it wasn’t just the scary suits). Plus, most rapes/sexual abuse/child molestation occurs by family and friends, NOT strangers, so “stranger danger” doesn’t really protect them here.
I teach my children to look out for behaviors. For example;
*Is an adult outside of our immediate family asking my child for help? No good, adults should only ask for help from other adults. I tell my children to get me, or to call 911 if its an emergency, but NOT to directly help the other adult.
*Is the adult buying them special gifts that need to be kept secret? No good. I’ve told my children how gifts can come with strings. I’ve told them that adults shouldn’t be asking them to keep secrets other than for birthday parties/gifts.
*I tell them to listen to their body. If someone keeps on invading their space, if someone is bothering them, if someone makes them feel “icky” then they should listen! This doesn’t mean that they can get away from social niceties.
*I use fairy tales to my benefit. I talk about whether the relationships are healthy. I point out cases where villains use trickery to fool the hero. For example one of my personal favorites is The Gingerbread Man.
The proud Gingerbread Man/Boy believes he can outrun everyone. At first, every animal he meets tells him explicitly that they want to eat him, so he outruns them easily. It’s easy to avoid the obvious threat.
But then the Gingerbread boy meets the fox, who is a classic predator. When the gingerbread boy doesn’t trust him, the fox immediately denies wanting to harm the gingerbread boy and quickly distracts the gingerbread boy with a problem. Of course, the fox will help the gingerbread boy out with his problem because the fox is such a NICE GUY(tm). Once riding on the fox’s tail, the fox keeps on moving the gingerbread boy, apologetically testing the gingerbread boy’s boundaries, until the gingerbread boy is sitting on the fox’s nose and then SNAP, the gingerbread boy gets either eaten or saved depending on the version.
Ok, there are different versions, but that’s the basics of the story. It’s a breakdown of classic predator behavior. The obvious threat is easy to avoid, but the real threat is the one that’s hidden behind a smile. Maybe Camilla should reread this story, as she seems to have missed the moral for the first 4 decades of her life.
None of this is victim-blaming. Victim-blaming is about whether someone “deserves” to be raped, and no-one deserves to be raped-EVER. Avoiding risk doesn’t mean someone “deserves” rape any more than avoiding smoking means that smokers “deserve” cancer. “Avoiding risk” and “deserving what you get” are two separate issues and its rape culture that likes to conflate them.
I have seen a few that rivaled it, but none that bested it. And none of them were as funny as she was.
:: raises glass to Molly ::
Chiming in late on the what-to-teach-one’s-daughters-about-rape bit: One thing that struck me, reading over this thread, is how much commonsense advice on anti-rape self-defence actually boils down, not to “dressing appropriately” (as if such a thing were even possible), or to acting demure, but to plain old vigilance. Watching one’s drinks. Watching one’s friends’ drinks. Running interference if there’s an obvious douchebag on the prowl. Being leery if “nice guys” seem a bit TOO friendly (and generous with the drinks). Designating drivers, having a buddy system. And so on. There is nothing wrong with teaching your girls to look out for themselves and one another, so long as it is in the context of making one’s own choices and setting one’s own limit, and expecting others to respect them. The only unfortunate thing is that one HAS to teach girls to protect themselves in the first place. Because obviously, that respect they have every right to expect is not always forthcoming. Rape culture is constantly trying to talk them out of expecting it, and teaching them instead to be constantly fearful of “what might happen if I step out of line”.
Paglia’s article makes even less sense than this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E50QazmwP7M
What is WRONG with Time lately? They also recently published another faux feminist claiming that Watson and #HeForShe are sexist woman-haters. (Forgot her name, not sure if I posted the link here)