I'm also very aware why very masculine men are not represented in academe. Very masculine men cannot sit still long enough. And so all the ideology of feminism is coming out of these women who are married to wordsmith men, who are not that combative or confrontational to begin with, because the really masculine men, the high-testosterone men, are so restless they can hardly sit still in class.
I'm very, very worried about this new kind of bourgeois imperialism which predicates the ultimate human type as someone who is good at sitting still at a desk.
Reason: Schools have rewarded that for a century.
Paglia: Well, here's the point. My father's generation, the Italian immigrants--my father was born here but my mother was born in Italy--they were leaving school earlier. The boys who were really restless were leaving school at 14.
Reason: People who were leaving school at 14 were not becoming college professors.
Paglia: I know that. What I'm saying is that in terms of ideology, sexual politics, we're getting a biased view.
People of the white upper-middle-class professional elite have very little direct contact with working-class men, even though the working-class men are everywhere around them and are keeping everything going. They are the ones who are the janitors, the construction workers, the plumbers, the police and firemen, and so on. It's everywhere.
But the world that those men have created works so well, they maintain it so assiduously, that there has been a contempt on the part of these complacent, pampered, coddled upper-middle-class people who are spouting a lot of this rhetoric. There's this arrogance that masculinity isn't something that we need anymore--this is the Gloria Steinem line: Masculinity is something that is pernicious and is the cause of all wars and destruction and violence and battering against women, and slowly we're going to be programming it out of our youth.
I said it in the Playboy interview: All it takes is one natural disaster for that entire artificial world to come crumbling down, and suddenly everyone will be screaming and yelling for the plumbers and the construction workers. Only masculine men of the working class will hold the civilization together.
Reason: Since you're always ragging on WASPy middle-class people, let me ask you about two different feminists in the public eye. One is your friend and mine, Christina Sommers [author of Who Stole Feminism?], who is a very nice, WASPy, bourgeois, conventional academic. And the other is Naomi Wolf [author of The Beauty Myth and Fire with Fire], who is the ethnic daughter of Berkeley bohemian leftists, who insists on telling the world in the pages of The New Republic the details of her sex life and who doesn't have a regular job. Yet it is Christina Sommers who is the rigorous critic of victimhood feminism, and Wolf is its darling. How does that fit into your anti-middle-class schema?
Paglia: Number one, there are two different generations. Christina Hoff Sommers is my generation, so she's coming out of the '60s revolution. She's a very independent-minded woman. Christina Sommers, as I made clear in the introduction to Vamps & Tramps, was out on the scene before my first book ever made it into print. In the late '80s, she was already out there, fighting hand-to-hand in the professional philosophers association against the encroachment of a certain type of propagandistic feminism.
She was one of the earliest people who wrote to me to express her support of my work and to pass on to me all these documents about her struggles in the American Philosophical Association. She is one of the most courageous women of my generation. She went out single-handedly without even Paglia out there to take some of the abuse.
Her spirit is actually the '60s spirit. She's someone who believed when she entered professional philosophy that women should achieve at the highest levels that had been established by men of the past. She believes with me that the proper education for young women is exposure to the greatest that has been thought, the greatest that has been written or achieved in the history of the arts, in philosophy, and so on. One does not go around finding fifth-rate works by women or 10th-rate works by women and using up precious college time in women's education for that.
Secondly, Naomi Wolf. One of my criticisms of Naomi Wolf is that, excuse me, the portrait of her parents as left-wing is one of her pieces of propaganda. Her father, if you just read his prose, is a very sober, learned man, a traditional scholar. And this is part of Naomi Wolf's propaganda about her life.
Next, one of my major criticisms of Naomi is that she has drifted from any kind of ethnic affiliation. I have constantly said this about her, Susan Faludi, or Gloria Steinem: that these women are not identifiably anything. Feminism has become their entire metaphysical, religious, and cultural world view. But feminism is not sufficiently developed as a system yet--at least it wasn't before me! What I'm trying to do is add aesthetics and psychology to the very narrow kind of ideology that these women are fanatically promulgating.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time.
nfl jerseys|11.17.10 @ 12:32AM|#
xrth
سهمي|12.11.10 @ 4:52PM|#
asgasg