Camille Paglia: War on Men Destroying American Culture
In October of 2012, Salon veteran, art historian, culture critic, and provocateur Camille Paglia returned to Salon for an interview in which she raved about Bravo’s Real Housewives series because, to her, the episodes were “authentic old-time soap opera,” a television genre she once adored and has since pronounced “dead.”
Hailing Real Housewives as “archetypal bitch fests,” Paglia said she had read that Gloria Steinem hates Real Housewives of New Jersey, and was ready to protest the show.“Well, there’s the big difference between Steinem and me,” Paglia said. “She sees the show as a distortion of women, while I see it as a revelation of the deep truth about female sexuality.”
Right there is the proof of why feminism has faded. Those second-wave feminists had a utopian view of women — they constantly asserted that anything negative about women is a projection by men. That’s not what I see on “Real Housewives”! It’s like the Discovery Channel — sending a camera to the African savannah to watch the cheetahs stalking the gazelles! What you’re seeing is the primal battles going on among women. Men are marginalized on these shows — they’re eye candy, to use Obama’s phrase, on the borderlines of the ferocity of female sexuality.In a recent Wall Street Journal interview, Paglia, now 66, demonstrated that she has not strayed from her role as the self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” who is quick to lambaste the movement and its orthodoxy.
Paglia also remains an enigma to many Americans who are exposed mostly to the “utopian” feminists in Washington, D.C. she more or less rails against.
Bari Weiss of the WSJ, who interviewed Paglia, said of the experience:
Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).Weiss observed, however, that the topic that gets the greatest rise out of Paglia is how attempts to dismiss the biological differences between men and women have influenced the collapse of Western civilization.
The diminished status of military service is only the start of the decline of the culture, according to Paglia.
"The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."
Consequently, cultural decline can be seen everywhere, from dysfunctional Washington to women’s fashion in its overemphasis on sexiness.
Weiss points out that Paglia, who dresses in androgynous style, has been told that she believes “women are at fault for their own victimization.”
Not so, says Paglia, as she explains her concept of “street-smart feminism.”
“I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters.”
Paglia disparages the mushiness that has become rampant in American culture, beginning as early as kindergarten.
"Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, and observes how difficult it is for boys in schools that have discontinued recess.
"They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."
Paglia is especially tuned in to this situation now that she is raising her 11 year-old son with her ex-partner, artist and teacher Alison Maddex, who lives nearby. Paglia sees that “female values,” such as sensitivity, socialization, and cooperation, are fostered and put up on a pedestal in schools over creative energy and the teaching of hard facts.
She notes that it only gets worse in colleges and universities.
"This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness,” Paglia told Weiss. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now."
Paglia, though, is not merely feeling sorry for men. The point is that the belittling of masculinity is causing women to suffer as well, leaving them to become “clones” that are destined for “Pilates for the next 30 years.”
The result has been disastrous for American society, she argues.
"Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.The question, however, is whether American culture can rebound. For Paglia, a big part of the cure is returning to an emphasis on industrial brawn and what were once traditional male trades such as construction, electricity, and plumbing.
“Michelle Obama’s going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," argues Paglia, who believes the drive for universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."
Paglia’s ideal feminist role models were women like Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn who were independent, savvy, and capable of competing with men without emasculating them. She parted ways in the late 1960's with the utopian feminists who did not share “her vision of ‘equal-opportunity feminism’ that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.”
Still the “Amazon feminist,” Paglia remains critical of Steinem, Naomi Wolf, and Susan Faludi for a brand of feminism that views gender as nothing more than a social construct.
Similarly, Paglia is critical of the National Organization for Women (NOW) for making abortion the outstanding women’s issue. By denying the role of nature in women’s lives, she says, these types of feminists have made the movement “antiseptic” so they could protect their conventional lifestyles, believing that they “have it all.”
Despite her criticism of the feminists who would deny the biological distinction between the sexes, Paglia thinks the movement can be saved if feminists would abandon the “nanny state” mentality that grew into political correctness.
According to Weiss, Paglia says the women’s movement needs to get back to "serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus.”
'Blindsided' President: Obama's Loose Grip on the Reins of State
2013 was anything but a banner year for President Obama.
A peppering of failures and scandals marked the first year of the second term of the "most transparent administration in history." These scandals came in a variety of shapes and sizes, but they all shared one prominent feature.That is the amount of knowledge Obama claimed to have of them before they happened – none.
In fact, it seems as if Obama has been practicing a technique of systematic denial of responsibility, claiming that as each new story of his administration's incompetence breaks, he himself is only learning of it the same way we are – through the news.
This indites him, at the least, of poor leadership. At worst, it suggests criminal dishonesty.
His technique goes at least as far back as the 2012 scandal of “Project Fast and Furious,” when the government sold traceable weapons which were later used to kill Americans. The administration claimed that Obama learned of this botched, unethical program through the media.
Next was the revelation that the IRS was illegally discriminating against Tea Party entities, which Obama learned about “when it came out in the news.” Obama insisted he “certainly did not know anything” then pushed reforms that retroactively made the persecution legal.
Other scandals included the NSA's phonetapping of allied powers (of which Obama “had no direct knowledge”) and its intrusion into Associated Press phone records (Jay Carney: “...we have no knowledge.”)
The capstone was Obama's plausible deniability concerning the Obamacare rollout, by which he was apparently “blindsided.”
This may raise questions about the quality of internal communication within the Obama administration, or it may raise questions about the president's honesty and his interpretation of the word “transparent.” Here at the start of a new year, let's have some fun speculating about what future stories Obama will be “blindsided” by, but which the average, educated American can probably see coming a mile away.
Could it be more having to do with Obamacare? Perhaps, when the administration's prediction that 78 million Americans will lose their employer-provided coverage comes true, Obama will claim that he, personally, had no knowledge of this effect of the law that bears his name. Perhaps when it becomes clear that Obamacare sign-ups are dangerously trending toward the old and sick, leaving insurance companies in an untenable position, Obama will claim that he “could not have predicted” that the law would require a taxpayer bailout of the insurance industry. As next year's open enrollment period begins in its now post-November-election time, voters will see skyrocketing premiums but be unable to rescind their already cast ballots. Perhaps the outcry over this will also “blindside” the president.
Indeed, if the media should break a story that Iran has developed a nuclear weapon, that Benghazi was a planned al Qaeda attack, or that the NSA's snooping goes beyond our worst fears, how plausible will Barack Obama's deniability be?
Sure, there are some things for which we should be profoundly thankful to the media if it manages to successfully communicate them to the president. If it succeeds, it will do so where trillions of dollars of government apparatus has failed.
One of these is the simple observation that the national debt doesn't go away on its own. It's doubtful that anyone would care whether Janet Yellen or the Washington Post passes this information along to Obama, as long as it reaches him. Likewise, any newspaper that can teach Obama what Kathleen Sebelius looks like gets our firm stamp of approval.
Let's hope that 2014 sees the “blindsided” president (whom the GOP has called the “Bystander President”) learning from his mistakes and taking a more active role in the governance of his country and the doing of his job. As the year unfolds, we'll all be keeping a close watch.
¿Tienen los medios noticiosos americanos un sesgo anticristiano?
En Prodigal Press: Confronting the Anti-Christian Bias of the American News Media (Prensa pródiga: Haciéndole frente al sesgo anticristiano de los medios noticiosos americanos), el periodista y escritor Warren Cole Smith explica cómo la visión progresista del mundo ha impregnado los principales medios de comunicación de Estados Unidos y cómo esa visión anticristiana del mundo está influencia a la sociedad americana.
“Los medios de comunicación de masas tienen una posición dominante en nuestra cultura actual y tienen un profundo impacto en cómo pensamos”, comento Smith en un reciente evento de la Fundación Heritage.
Según Smith, en el siglo XIX, muchos de los periódicos de Estados Unidos más conocidos profesaban abiertamente su cristianismo. Smith explicó que incluso el fundador del New York Times era un cristiano que se oponía al aborto en sus editoriales y en la sección de noticias de su periódico.
Smith afirmó que, durante los últimos 150 años, la ideología progresista y los cambios en la política, la tecnología y la cultura han hecho mella en los medios informativos de Estados Unidos, creando un fuerte sesgo anticristiano.
“Hoy en día, el Times editorializa de manera regular a favor del matrimonio homosexual y del aborto”, indicó Smith.
Y “recientemente, el columnista del Times Thomas Friedman equiparó al ‘Tea Party’ con Hizbolá. Su colega en el Times, Joe Nocera, lo superó diciendo: ‘Los republicanos del ‘Tea Party’ han desatado una yihad contra el pueblo americano’”, explicó Smith.
Smith cree que se debe atraer a los cristianos, “Creo que el periodismo es la guerra aérea de nuestro tiempo. …Sigo pensando que aunque puede que nuestro número sea escaso, con la ayuda de Dios, seremos suficientes”.
Autor de numerosos libros, Smith es editor asociado de la revista WORLD, editor y la redactor de WORLD news service, una empresa de comunicación dedicada a presentar historias de modo fiel y desde una perspectiva cristiana, además de colaborar en uno de los libros de texto más ampliamente utilizados en las facultades de periodismo de todo el mundo, Public Relations.
