Hey, this Camille Paglia broad is not in the least dumb. I just read an interview with her, and it’s good. I haven’t read anything more insightful on the 3 subjects she covers in a while. Hah.
I was going to post a quote but there are too many good passages for me to reproduce here. The last paragraph is really great, so make sure you get to the end.
To me it seems dumb to classify biological sex based on chromosomes of all things. Genes are relevant in terms of how they’re expressed more than being meaningful in and of themselves, in my opinion. And there’s at least one case of a woman born with XY chromosomes successfully giving birth; are we going to say she’s biologically male? At least Paglia is willing to say they’re trans male and trans female though, acknowledging that they don’t fit neatly into their original biological category (and most trans people are biologically somewhere in between and it’s a pretty accurate way of describing it.) Nuance is good. I always find it silly when people want to call someone who’s indistinguishable from a non-trans woman who’s had a hysterectomy apart from their DNA biologically male. If a medical examination can’t tell you that they’re male…
I did find her La Leche League jokes funny, and she was very on point with her analysis of Trump, Islam, and the dumb liberal obsession with language (then right after talking about that, she gets nitpicky about language herself; kind of ironic.) But it was mostly a regurgitation of stuff I already agreed with, so it wasn’t very valuable to me. That’s just me though; her ideas will be valuable to many people who read the interview if they can look past the fact that she voted for Jill Stein.
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Ultimately, nobody gives a flap if you or I call ourselves male or female. The world is big and largely indifferent. The problems begin when people insist on controlling the reaction of others to their definitions of self. That’s the whole issue here.
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“this Camille Paglia broad is not in the least dumb”
Was somebody saying she was? I’ve loved her writing since she was writing in Salon back in the 1990s. I disagree with some things she writes but her style is always sharp and on point and often hilarious.
I did think this was one of the better things from her in recent years.
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I had to read her Sexual Personae back in college. She was the favorite author of that “women are a force of nature” feminist prof I keep mentioning. It’s possible Paglia is a good journalist but a bad academic.
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Heh! At least she didn’t start gushing about Madonna this time. Or tell everyone about the horrors of Foucault. Or make an obligatory reference to her partner to remind everyone she’s a lesbian. It’s funny to me she says she’s trans now in this interview. She was always entertainingly contrarian if predictable after a while. Nothing she said in that interview shocked me coming out of her mouth.
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Another great thing about this Paglia video is that she references a video by Sheila Jeffreys which led me to listen to a bunch of her other speeches.
Jeffreys is a classic in-your-face second wave feminist and while I can find lots to disagree with her about… I don’t care. It’s just such a blessed relief to listen to an assertive, take no prisoners radical and not one of the weepy, mopey, all pose and no backbone pudding creatures that masquerade as feminists nowadays.
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I know! I started reading rad fem websites even though I agree with almost nothing. But at least, they don’t use these whiny, apologetic, “inclusive” tones.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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