Well, I’m glad my reaction to Paglia wasn’t just me. I guess she is to academic social criticism what Trump is to politics.
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Ah - she’s Bob Roberts.
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Absolutely awesome article by Molly Ivins. Here’s a quote, “What we have here, fellow citizens, is a
crassly egocentric, raving twit.”
The best that can be said about Paglia is that she discovered very early that there was money to be made by contrarian pop-trolling. And she had the academic credentials to lend an air of pseudo-intellectualism to her feminist-poking nonsense.
She’s still working the same gig.
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I really have to watch that again!
I don’t know if analogous, I find her more in line with your average conservative bobblehead. Her gimmick is being a “liberal lesbian academic” who spouts nothing but traditional values and appeals against feminism through the guise of slightly more literacy than your average teahadist.
She reminds me more of the “respectable conservatives” who write literate but foul opinion articles for newspapers.
Or the Thomas Friedman of sex-negativity.
Being a conservative media darling is a pretty lucrative gig.
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Yeah, it seems like a lot of the usual slanderous straw manning going on here. You’ve not really provided much evidence that she holds right wing beliefs, mostly when she praises some aspect of the right it’s for style rather than content.
I don’t consider being Libertarian as necessarily being right-wing btw, and while in America many Libertarians are actually quite right-wing (the Pauls, and the early tea-party before they went mental), unlike on this side of the atlantic (where Liberalism and Libertarianism are still closely related), but she really doesn’t strike me as one of them.
Of whom is this “usual” you’re talking about?
Her shtick involves being the token supposed “liberal” who spouts right-wing antifeminist beliefs and states that feminism and other forms of empowerment are holding women back.
What are you looking for here? And what insight am I skipping over?
Paglia is as big of a loathsome media trolley as Trump.
She is both a self-proclaimed Libertarian and agreeing with right-wing beliefs towards traditional values as a part of her character, which is why I make the connection.
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Of what? Of whom? What is this “usual” you’re talking about?
Of her, by you. Usual: as it mostly has been with her.
Her shtick involves being the token supposed “liberal” who spouts right-wing beliefs.
What are you looking for?
Evidence for that statement.
What is this supposed to be an example of for example? Seems perfectly reasonable to me, and certainly not in the slightest bit right-wing.
Well alrightythen.
You posts the Ivins, you gets the like.
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Are you really this myopic? She is using a straw attack on Feminism, as if achieving womens’ rights will not better humanity.
She demeans the left for attempting to move towards equality, it is her gimmick.
It is not a tenet of womens rights that it is all the world has to offer. It is something every human should champion.
I can’t believe that someone sincerely is fooled by / finds insight in that pseudoacademic garbage.
You want me to find a statement where she takes off her lizard mask and admits that her career is based upon being a “token liberal” who spouts conservative politics?
This is not an isolated incident of contrarianism (for which I could interpret with some amount of nuance), it is her life’s work, a parody of the left for the benefit of the right.
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Are you really this myopic? She is using a straw attack on Feminism, as if achieving womens’ rights will not better humanity.
There are two things here, first she’s not talking about women’s rights there, the ‘feminist agenda’ she’s referring to is the whole ontological structure of american academic feminism, and it’s inherently cultish and dogmatic nature, not the dictionary definition of feminism, so this is no straw man on her part. Secondly, you’re doing it again.
She demeans the left for attempting to move towards equality, it is her gimmick.
Well, she certainly demeans some on the left (in a hyperbolic manner at times it has to be said), but not because they want to move towards equality, more because they want to move away from reality.
You want me to find a statement where she takes off her lizard mask and admits that her career is based upon being a token liberal who spouts conservative politics?
No, I just want you to find me an example of conservative policies she supports. And remember, criticism of post-structuralist gibberish doesn’t count as right wing, right wing is not defined as ‘not american academic feminism’.
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She supports their “traditional values” and embraces their policies that women need to stop “complaining so much” and “accept men” and their sexual harassment, alongside every negative aspect of masculinity.
For example-
When an educated culture routinely denigrates masculinity and manhood, then women will be perpetually stuck with boys, who have no incentive to mature or to honor their commitments. And without strong men as models to either embrace or (for dissident lesbians) to resist, women will never attain a centered and profound sense of themselves as women.
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript132.html
MS. PAGLIA: Wait – and here are the aims of my program. We’ve gotto get back to a pro-art, all right, pro-beauty, pro-men kind offeminism. And –
…
MS. PAGLIA: Well, I think it was absurd. First of all, again,totalitarian regime, okay, is where 10 years after the fact you’renominated now for a top position in your country and you are beingasked to reconstruct lunch conversations that you had with someonewho never uttered a peep. Okay? This is to Anita Hill: ‘All right,when he started to talk again about this pornographic films at lunchin the government cafeteria, what did you do?’ ‘I tried to change thesubject.’ Excuse me! I mean, that is ridiculous. I mean, so many ofthese cases –
MS. SOMMERS: He never touched her.
MS. PAGLIA: He never touched her. Okay? That was such a trumped-upcase by the feminist establishment.
…
MS. PAGLIA: The time for hostility to men is past. There was thatmoment. I was part of it. I have punched men, kicked men, hit themover the head with umbrellas. Okay? I am openly confrontational withmen. As an open lesbian, I have been – you know, I express my angerto men directly. I don’t get in a group and whine about men. So,oddly, I give men a break and admit the greatness of male, you know,achievements and so on. What we have to do now is get over that angertoward men, all right, and we have to bring the sexes back together.Reconciliation between the sexes is the first order of business.
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right wing is not defined as ‘not american academic feminism’.
Also, what is this ridiculously counterfactual definition?
She is socially conservative and regressive in her values and speeches. Feminism doesn’t have to be left-wing, but it is one of those things that the right actively desires to erode and destroy.
Her ideological cohorts are in the American right-wing. That you support her social conservative beliefs does not reflect somehow positively on her.
Her entire marketed point of novelty is that she is shallowly a “ivory tower liberal lesbian” who posts about how men are powerful, and just and feminism is corrupt and unnecessary. Her “controversial” views are not controversial at all. They are very common among much of America, and hardly shocking. Just sad.
For that reason I can accept that some people might not see her as nutty as I do. But to deny that she’s not carved out a career as “even the LIBERAL Camille Paglia has to agree with our conservative talking points”
…it’s astounding how that could not observe what is occurring.
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I remember first hearing of her in '92, right as I was finishing college. She came to do a lecture (IIRC, with the support or at least encouragement of the YCT) and was described beforehand as “Ayn Rand on acid.”
ETA: I also remember not being able to walk in a bookstore (well, the two closest stores anyway) without seeing a stacked display of Sexual Personae.
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That’s a Poe, right?
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fist bump! Great minds think alike, and all that.
First, she has just confessed to multiple counts of assault and battery.
Second, she equates being a lesbian and having anger towards men as if they’re connected.
I have never understood how someone so personally screwed up can manipulate the media so well.
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No, not a Poe; just a complex admiration.
But everyone’s okay with my opinion on how soft her hands are, right?
I would suggest that reconciliation between the sexes is the second order of business, the first order of business being to get men to stop raping and murdering women wholesale. Why exactly does Paglia think women have anger towards men, anyway? Penis envy? Inherent female bitterness? Feminism run amok?
But then, she thinks rape survivors are “clingy sob sisters”. Nice.
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She never addresses these horrors, just that women need to step back and be okay with their lot. I guess being such a famous (for her pop-culture) ivory tower academic means that you never have to get your hands dirty.
Wow, you are super-obsessed with her! I didn’t know 95% of what you posted about her here. Thanks. I think of Paglia kind of the same way I think of Patricia Highsmith - a crabby, unkind, misanthropic person who is also very funny and entertaining. She seems to have value to you as a person you love to hate.
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