I’ve been a forever fan of Camille Paglia. I first encountered her in a print copy of Reason Magazine in 1991, sitting on my canapé en cuir in the south of France. Big Girls Don’t Cry. Later, I took in Virginia Postrel’s Interview with the Vamp.
Here’s her new—pretty short and to the point—piece in Time: It’s a Man’s World, and It Always Will Be — The modern economy is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author.
[Cue impractical panty styles on many levels, all in a bunch.]
Feminist activists loath Paglia. She’s smarter than all of them put together, whites better than all of them combined into a pool of submissive secretaries flirting with their Don Draper-esqe bosses, doesn’t fit their mold (she’s a social liberal and lesbian), and she cuts through their warm, reeking piles of bullshit like a knife through warm, reeking piles of bullshit.
Her male, hero worship is veritably Howard Roarkian and John Galtian, all in one. Or, you could just say, Randian.
If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct. […]
A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism. Men’s faults, failings and foibles have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment. Ideologue professors at our leading universities indoctrinate impressionable undergraduates with carelessly fact-free theories alleging that gender is an arbitrary, oppressive fiction with no basis in biology.
Is it any wonder that so many high-achieving young women, despite all the happy talk about their academic success, find themselves in the early stages of their careers in chronic uncertainty or anxiety about their prospects for an emotionally fulfilled private life? 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.
From my long observation, which predates the sexual revolution, this remains a serious problem afflicting Anglo-American society, with its Puritan residue. In France, Italy, Spain, Latin America and Brazil, in contrast, many ambitious professional women seem to have found a formula for asserting power and authority in the workplace while still projecting sexual allure and even glamour. This is the true feminine mystique, which cannot be taught but flows from an instinctive recognition of sexual differences. In today’s punitive atmosphere of sentimental propaganda about gender, the sexual imagination has understandably fled into the alternate world of online pornography, where the rude but exhilarating forces of primitive nature rollick unconstrained by religious or feminist moralism. […]
History must be seen clearly and fairly: obstructive traditions arose not from men’s hatred or enslavement of women but from the natural division of labor that had developed over thousands of years during the agrarian period and that once immensely benefited and protected women, permitting them to remain at the hearth to care for helpless infants and children. Over the past century, it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery. […]
It is overwhelmingly men who do the dirty, dangerous work of building roads, pouring concrete, laying bricks, tarring roofs, hanging electric wires, excavating natural gas and sewage lines, cutting and clearing trees, and bulldozing the landscape for housing developments. It is men who heft and weld the giant steel beams that frame our office buildings, and it is men who do the hair-raising work of insetting and sealing the finely tempered plate-glass windows of skyscrapers 50 stories tall.
Every day along the Delaware River in Philadelphia, one can watch the passage of vast oil tankers and towering cargo ships arriving from all over the world. These stately colossi are loaded, steered and off-loaded by men. The modern economy, with its vast production and distribution network, is a male epic, in which women have found a productive role — but women were not its author.
More excerpts than I normally do, but what the hell? Here, then, the whole thing.
Then there’s Judgy Bitch, who blogged about all the lafable, impractical for man’s work, panties in a bunch: Jezebel has some trouble understanding Camille Paglia. Let’s help them out.
Oh dear. Cue the shrieking harridans over at Jezebel. They demand to know just what Camille means by that! How could that be possible? The increasingly clueless and defiantly obtuse Erin Gloria Ryan has some questions for Dr. Paglia.
Let’s help her answer those, shall we?
“A peevish, grudging rancor against men has been one of the most unpalatable and unjust features of second- and third-wave feminism [Citation needed].”
http://www.munkdebates.com/debates/the-end-of-men
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
http://www.amazon.com/Men-Are-Not-Cost-Effective-America/dp/0941138119
http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1339991-are-men-necessary-when-sexes-collide
“Men’s faults, failings and foibles [Like? Aggression? War? Rape? Dick-waving? The Jackass franchise? What?] have been seized on and magnified into gruesome bills of indictment [By whom?].”
By whom? Are you kidding me? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?!?!
How about by Jezebel?
Men are rapists (especially MRA men)!
Assholes who don’t know how to clean but can be trained like dogs to do so by the truly dedicated!
Fathers are not really that important after all!
blah blah blah blah …. Basically the entire site is devoted to pointing out any flaws the ladies can find in men, all the while ignoring the fact they would have no power, clean water, communications or computer technology and would essentially be screaming messages back and forth between grass huts without men, a point Camille has made in the past.
Alright, enough; this has already escaped the confines of a “quickie”—but I love the post title too much to change it now. There’s my make-fun-of-stupid-morons-too-stupid-to-even-know it (that’s the pernicious side of moron, you know), for the day.
Go have yourself some fun with the Judgy Bitch for the rest of it.