Where is Camille Paglia?

Somebody needs to rattle some bones.

...we might get another Hillary Clinton out of the deal.

I remember how deftly she managed to skewer Bush in 2000. We desperately need her now to cover the RNC.

Although I disagree with her on just about everything she says about women or feminism (like, how would she know?), I do appreciate the way she manages to deconstruct so many of the right's sacred cows.

A real loose cannon with a hair trigger...never know who or how she'll blast.

Me, I just enjoy a reeling genius.

She has been working the same schtick for a loooooooong time

I have no use for anti-feminists.

and that's good for the dialog.

It ain't about agreement.

http://www.jahsonic.com/CamillePaglia.html

Paglia is an intellectual of many apparent contradictions: a classicist who champions art both high and low, with a Hobbesian view that human nature is inherently dangerous, and yet who also celebrates dionysian revelry in the wilder, darker sides of human sexuality.

Her significance in the 1990s intellectual world was two-fold:

The seventies had seen the rise of a particularly rigid, doctrinaire "feminism" that many were finding stifling but only a few were challenging (e.g., the "sex positive" S&M lesbians, perhaps typified by Susie Bright).
The left was pushing for a change in the traditional focus of western universities on western culture (sometimes derided as the study of "dead white males"). For example, Stanford University was dropping its well-regarded undergraduate requirement of a year-long course in "Western Culture" in favor of a more broadly-focused study of "Cultures Ideas and Values" or CIV.
Against this backdrop, Camille Paglia appeared on the scene as a female intellectual who enjoyed challenging the left-wing position in these areas, but far from being the usual stodgy conservative, she did so by arguing from an unusual, flashy position that also embraced homosexuality, fetish, and prostitution. Her later writings in her column in Salon often use the word "libertarian," as she speaks out in favor of individual freedom, which may help explain the apparent contradiction, and the consternation she causes in crossing back and forth between the dominant political camps. --http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia

Paglia on Feminism
YJE: How would you define feminism and do you consider yourself a feminist?

CP: Yes, I consider myself 100 percent a feminist, at odds with the feminist establishment in America. For me the great mission of feminism is to seek the full political and legal equality of women with men. However, I disagree with many of my fellow feminists as an equal opportunity feminist, who believes that feminism should only be interested in equal rights before the law. I utterly oppose special protection for women where I think that a lot of the feminist establishment has drifted in the last 20 years. The hot button issue that I have become notorious for is date rape. The modern independent woman has to be fully responsible for her behavior and experiences in every social encounter. I do not want a situation where we have women running to authority figures to intervene for them with men. In 1964, I arrived at college at a time when women were second class citizens and there was an elaborate system of protectionism. We were kept in sexually segregated dorms under lock and key. While the men could go out all night long, we had to be in at 11:00 p.m. and sign in. The colleges were acting in loco parentis in place of the parent and they in effect said to us, RWe must protect you. The world is a dangerous place you could be raped. And what we women of the 60s said was, Give us the freedom to risk rape we want equality with men. Truly free modern women must expect the possibility that they can be attacked if they are going to go out with strangers. I cannot stand the young feminists of the late 80s and 90s who demand that authority figures come back into sex. We women of the 60s shoved authority figures out of sex. http://www.yale.edu/yje/paglia.html, <...> <...>

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Everybody needs to be challenged to stay sharp.

group-think

...delusional windbag. I figured that out all on my own.

She's a joke among English scholars (from whence she came), and fancies herself to be a pop culture critic who takes herself far more seriously than anyone else does.

She reminds me of a four-year-old who's learned that she can shock people by saying nasty words; a bit of a one-trick pony, and I grew tired of her schtick long ago. We have far better (and far better equipped) folks on our side who can shake things up.

but if "we have far better (and better equipped folks) on our side who can shake things up"...where are they, and why aren't they doing it? Nobody can touch her in that dept.

The Age of Hollywood <...>
Camille Paglia's central thesis is that in the 20th century (which she calls the Age of Hollywood) pagan popular culture overtook and vanquished the high arts. Thanks to advances in technology, pop became a universal language, as catholic in its reach as the medieval church. Once pop art embraced commercial iconography, the avant-garde was dead.

Pop culture, literature or politics. I have gripes with her on all three, but since this is DU, I'll focus for brevity's sake on politics. She's a bit like that drunken blowhard Hitchens--she believes if she turns her ire on the democrats, she's being simultaneously clever and morally superior, and she's generally neither. I think the (empty) logic of that approach speaks for itself. Here's a quick rundown of some of her positions:

Thinks we're all silly for tagging Ashcroft as sinister and for suggesting that Bush wants to outlaw abortion:

http://dir.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/07/inaug/index.html?sid=1010777

Thinks Bush may be just what this country needs (and she has lovely things to say about Al Gore in this one):

http://dir.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/01/17/pre_inaug/index.html?sid=1007513

Bashes Hillary and says what a swell president Condi would make:

http://dir.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/28/bush/index.html?sid=1016260

Mocks the Million Mom March:

http://dir.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/05/17/cpmillionmom/index.html?sid=774040

Praises Rush Limbaugh:

http://dir.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2000/03/15/suprtues/index.html?sid=683904

I could go on....but I don't think I have to (there's another link out there where she praises David Horowitz for his diatribes against "liberal" universities...blech). Yes, we have folks on our side who are very good at shaking things up. Name number one: Michael Moore.

I can understand people taking issue with Paglia, I certainly am not in lock step with her. She does offer interesting insight, regardless of perspective, and shaking up the status-quo is always good. The thing thing that troubles me is attributing motive when it is not, at all, clear.

to put her mouth where her money is, she would leave her cushy ivory tower berth.

Name a more dedicated champion of Art.

she's a pathetic harpy who desperately wants to "get down" by championing pop culture, but still enjoy all the perks of a rarefied academic world (which she professes to deplore)
She's Marshall McLuhan with a brain tumor.
A champion of nothing but her own petty ego.
I can't believe I have wasted this much time discussing that irrelevant fraud.

move it somewhere permanent.

and I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone takes her misogynist drivel seriously!

She didn't nothing but trash the Clinton's for 8 straight years - just in case anyone out there is suffering from amnesia. How soon we forget!

Still no one better for shaking things up...which is badly needed.

In case anyone out there didn't notice.

What's she going to do? Call Theresa Heinze a "butch"?

Wow! How wild and crazy is that?

:boring:

She is anything but petty and simplistic. Agree with her or not.

She's been descontructing every intellectual fad for decades.

everybody, on all sides, owes her something.

-----------------------------

Paglia on Popular Taste
A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, wich is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy. Academic commentary on popular culture is either ghettoized as lackluster "communications", tarted up with semiotics or loaded down with grim , quasi-Marxist, Frankfurt School censoriousness: the pitifully witless masses re always being brainwashed by money-brubbing capitalist pigs. But mass media is completely, even servilely commercial. It is a mirror of the popular mind. All the P.R. in the world cannot make a hit movie or sitcom. The people vote with ratings and dollars. Academic Marxists, with their elitist sense of superiority to popular taste, are the biggest snobs in America -- Camille Paglia in 'Sex, Art and American Culture' page ix.

for decades. She's a mountebank.

But then, that is the unpredictability that gets me where I live.

Camille Paglia and SM
Ah, yeah, now Sexual Personae, my first book, ah, followed, ah, one of the most important things I followed through Western culture was this thing of sado-masochism. I am not a practising S&M anything. My real sex life is rather boring, probably. But, um, I just discovered that theme and, you know, and by the time that book came out it was amazing how, um, it was part of the general culture, through Mapplethorpe's images and a lot of other things that were going on in movies. So, um, I would just say that for me I follow the philosophy of the Marquis de Sade, that is I do not believe as Rousseau claims that we are born good and that we're made bad by corrupt society or rather we're born ...

http://www.jahsonic.com/SM.html

she's always snuggling up to what she sees as an entre to power. Oh, and she is terrifically derivative. But, my PhD isn't specifically in Lit so I'll let them "deconstruct" her "borrowings" if they have the stomach for it. The whole pop culture thing comes from 50s and 60s American Studies and people like Warren Susmann---funny, she never credits them.

Basically, she's a big mouthed boor. My favorite statement of hers was on the sale of her book where of Susan Sontag she said she was finally happy to pass that "bitch"---was there something about Sontag that made her a bitch? Nope, she just had gotten farther than Paglia. Unpredictability is interesting but, frankly, I thought that by around 1995 she was all too predictable. But, whatever floats your boat kid.

Your tone is sickeningly elitist and self-serving.

Did you grow up in Midland? If so, I might have known your mother, intimately.

Don't call me kid.

90% of what she says is "living entirely in my own insular world" crap. The
The other 10% can be brilliant.

Personally, I don't want her around. She reminds me of nothing so much as
a smarter more liberal Anne Coulter. Coulter's a loose cannon good at stiring
things up too.

No meaning there.

Paglia has instigated meaningful dialog and debate that has influenced or impacted our culture, depending on your view.

Big difference.

Just curious. It's one thing to stir thing up simply for the sake of stirring things up; it's another to do so constructively. I'm unimpressed so far with any evidence that her cage-rattling has produced any constructive dialog.

Believe what you wish.

...you had an example. I'm not saying that just to give you a hard time--I've read Paglia extensively, and find her little better than a blast of hot air. That's not a slam on you. As this thread has grown, I've been trying to think of any of her "positions" that have produced a significant dialog, but can't think of (or find--I even did a search) a single one. She's mostly an echo-chamber who likes to hear herself talk. She's a wanna-be rockstar, and that's about the extent of everything she does and says.

I understand where you're coming from with the desire to have somebody provocative to get a dialog going. I don't see what good Paglia would be in that regard, however, as she mostly likes to mock the left for the sake of mocking them. There's no end to her means, and she really doesn't provide any meaningful dialog.

I also stand by my earlier point that we've got better cage-rattlers already working on our side, chief among them Michael Moore. He's proven to be a sharp critic of Bush as well as somebody who can turn the gaze inward and remind us of our own foibles as a party.

Camille Paglia's central thesis is that in the 20th century (which she calls the Age of Hollywood) pagan popular culture overtook and vanquished the high arts. Thanks to advances in technology, pop became a universal language, as catholic in its reach as the medieval church. Once pop art embraced commercial iconography, the avant-garde was dead.

She's only rephrasing what many, many critics before her have said--going back to the first time Warhol hung up a picture of a soup can and called it art, and even farther back than that. I do not understand what's so special about that little rant of hers, primarily because she's not the first one to make the argument. And I don't think her version of the rant is special or more eloquent than those who came before her.

It's also a bit self-contradictory, because Paglia goes on in other essays to faun over the power of different aspects of pop culture. That's one of her biggest problems as a critic--and one of the reasons she's not taken seriously--because she wants to have it both ways. Pick a side and stick to it.

As far as what she'd have to offer us during this vital election season, I again can only shrug at your enthusiasm. The links I gave above outline her political position and rather juvenile attempts at shocking people. I just don't see how she can shake things up, as you say.

Nothing original under the sun, or haven't you heard? Everything is derivative.

How is a love of specific aspects of pop culture contradictory to the concern over an overall negative impact on culture?

That's like saying if you loved the Beatles you must love Madonna.

Nonsense. But elaborately stated.

but I'm sure the Right thinks Anne the Man instigates meaningful dialog too.

Mostly Paglia says seemingly brilliant things that don't hold up under any
kind of real scrutiny. And her ideas are essentially conservative IMO.

Her contribution isn't in her persuasion.

I forgot who said it, but this scathe of Paglia is in my collection of favorite invective:

"Cammy, a cunning little pseudointellect posing as a 'feminista,' makes me lose my low-fat lunch. Women like her are enough to turn straight men gay! Many professional writers loathe her for being a pretentious pop-psychologist who thinks she has all the answers. And, like writers in general (who are mostly broke from lack of talent), they don't laugh when they hear what Wolf earns. They instead cry bitter tears inside their sixth-floor walk-ups where they spend their lives, alone and miserable, because they cannot admit to themselves that they are witless -- and are so chock-full of self-loathing -- as Paglia is -- that they wrestle with the razor blade every night."

The self-loathing. I'm never sure it's self-loathing of herself as a woman, or self-loathing of herself as a lesbian. Either way, it's pretty sad.

I call it lame, materialistic, poorly written pap.

She makes me gag. Get over yourself, Camille!

She finally found a woman to share her life with, so she is no longer raging at the entire female gender. As soon as she found a girlfriend, she was no longer angry, she had nothing left to say, and that's when we stopped hearing from her. She will never write that second volume of her one book that she was promising all these years.

That's the whole problem with Camille. I thoroughly enjoyed Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. As a student of art/anthropology/history/myth, etc., I eat this stuff up with a spoon. Do I "believe" it, literally? No, but she had a few original thoughts & a way with words. I eagerly awaited the next volume.

But she found it more profitable to produce writing in smaller, more marketable bits. Snippy, liberal/academic/feminist bashing pays better than "art/anthropology/history/myth, etc."

America is toast.

Totally calm here...You were supposed to laugh.

Here's a nice midnight kick to her teeth! :puke:

if we're lucky. God I can't stand her! :puke:

Would we see another Atilla?