I have enjoyed reading Camille Paglia for a long time. I fervently oppose many of her positions, of course. BUT… she is tough and honest and clear and, oh boy, can she write. Reading her scary-good prose is an unsettling pleasure.
In light of the catholic feminist uprising against Pope Francis that is building and dividing the catholic Left, and in light of Pope Francis’ firm slamming of the door on women’s ordination or female cardinals (which he called “un battuta… a joke, a wisecrack”), I found this piece by feminist Camille Paglia of great interest.
She is dead on in most of her assessment of most feminists.
Here is a sample, from 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
By Camille Paglia
If men are obsolete, then women will soon be extinct—unless we rush down that ominous Brave New World path where females will clone themselves by parthenogenesis, as famously do Komodo dragons, hammerhead sharks, and pit vipers.
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. [Do I hear an “Amen!”?]
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 glamor. This is the true feminine mystique, [pace Betty Friedan] 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.
It was always the proper mission of feminism to attack and reconstruct the ossified social practices that had led to wide-ranging discrimination against women. But surely it was and is possible for a progressive reform movement to achieve that without stereotyping, belittling, or demonizing men. 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.
[…]
Read the rest there. I especially enjoyed her description of men, not women, doing the dangerous stuff after “the next inevitable apocalypse”.
Oh how I pray that Paglia will come over the right side of things. She has about 500 MHz more brainspeed than the entire corpus of catholic feminists combined.
I am informed that the “Soap Sisters”, the Dominicans in New Jersey who make the wonderful soaps, will shut down their store after 16 December.
