Camille Paglia: Intellectual Fraud

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The Public Persona Of Camille Paglia: A Case Of Intellectual Fraud

This choppy piece of writing began as a challenge I posed to a friend. One was offered the opportunity of counting the number of cases of lying, dishonesty, misrepresentation, false claims, stupidity, and general disingenuousness committed by Camille Paglia in several hours of footage of her recorded public appearances. Since this is foremost a mere listing of such incidences, one should not expect an exegesis of the good lady’s works. Although I may pursue such an examination of her works in a manner not too unlike my current study, such will certainly be of a higher caliber, and will avoid the constant repetition of noted offenses the current writing provides. I, in fact, look forward to it. From what I have seen of her works so far, her writings are even more egregious in their lack of integrity than her speeches.

I should say that, despite my utter contempt for the woman, I consider her a fine adversary, perhaps for the many traits and interests we share in common. We both celebrate the irrational, the imaginative, in addition to the outright intellectual. We both share an interest in sexuality and gender differences. We both have an interest in feminism, though we are on opposing sides in this war. If she were not guilty of many flagrant acts of lying I might even respect the lady.

To give you an idea of the path this examination, I should give you a couple details about Paglia, her work, and her tendencies. First, at the age of forty-three, Paglia’s main work was published, Sexual Personae. It is an examination of the history of Western art in relation to sexuality, or so I’m told. Already I have seen quotes from the work that attempt to reach far beyond the bounds of reality, generally a series of claims that could never be defended, intellectually or otherwise. Now, it is important to know that although Dr. Camille is a natural liar, her ideas can sometimes sound attractive, especially to women. But even the girls need to step back and think about the things the prof proffers in her frantic rants. One of the most bizarre of phenomena that Paglia (pronounces, by the way, Pah-lee-uh) seems to consistently manifest is self-contradiction. As we get into the ugly detail, all shall see what I mean. Since this writing is meant to be a mere numbering of her untruths and stupidities, I will not get too detailed before the counting begins. So the reader knows what to expect, I will attempt to counter many of her misunderstandings and more egregious acts of ingenuousness with my own understanding of the subject where possible. And as a warning, you will encounter innumerable incidents of repetition; this examination is based on hundreds of pages of notes from which certain repetitions have been expurgated, though some have been untouched, if just to show her consistent flaws of contradiction, untruth, and poor thinking. The numbering system is included merely to show the sheer volume of her flagrant falsehoods and foolish intellectual faux pas.

Paglia’s appearance on Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher

We’ll begin our evaluation of the vacuous enlightenment of Professor Paglia with her two-day long exclusive appearance on this old show. Let us note that Camille always speaks in a neurotic and rapid chatter, which as one writer has commented, “sounds like Woody Woodpecker repairing your roof.” This show hosted by the political comedian (a double-hack, by my evaluation), Bill Maher, usually followed the format of having four guests every night, who spent half an hour arguing over the latest political mumbo-jumbo; Bill made an exception for Paglia, whom he obviously found both appealing and controversial, having her on without additional guests two nights in a row.

Camille comes out swinging, with her declaration that she hates dogma in any form. She is opposed to what she calls the Stalinist feminism of the 70’s. As we shall see in this seemingly endless critique, she often makes such claims, yet she never once proposes that we eliminate the man-hating laws that have entered into the legislation of both states and the nation with the help of feminist lobbyists, including man-only domestic abuse laws, which land the man in jail no matter who be the abuser, restraining orders that leave the man little, if any, chance of defending himself from accusation, and child custody laws that not only assume the mother to be the parent preferred but often deny visitation rights to the father, meanwhile requiring the man to pay either alimony, or child support, whether or not he has visitation rights; in other words, a man loses his family but must still support them. By this very lack of mention of such one-sided laws, Paglia reveals herself as a shill for feminism, whether witting or not. For all of her talk and chatter of reform, she has not achieved a single one, and she appears to have no interest in doing so.

One of her favorite canned anecdotes involves her love of the Rolling Stones, whom most feminists her age and older considered sexist, specifically their song “Under My Thumb,” a song that is clearly about a man who has a woman in his pocket, has control over her every action in fact, while he goes about his wanton life, sleeping with whomever he prefers at the time and living the life of the proverbial philanderer. Now, Camille, in her attempt to dismiss the one-sidedness of the relationship clearly described in the song, latches on to the fact that she “once had him down,” which actually turns his activities into an act of masculine revenge against a woman he considers a bitch who needs to be punished by way of his extreme attractiveness, an attractiveness, of course, brought on by his rock stardom—the song is obviously about Mick or whichever band member wrote the lyrics; all are equally attractive in their rock star glory. Yet Camille swears there is a dynamic in the song because of this line; she swears that this week he has her down and next week she’ll again have him down. Nowhere in the actual lyrics is this even implied; it is actually understood that now that he’s a man of real status, she’ll either have to put up with his rules and their double-standard or buy her ticket home. The implication she so desperately grasps for while declaring it with such bravado does not exist. She is simply wrong (1).

When asked what kind of music she likes she mentions Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, and Van Halen as masculine types she adores, and further comments that she dislikes the P.C. grunge, meaning by this that grunge music is a pussy-whipped sort of fair that is the result of bad feminist political correctness. Now, if grunge music consisted merely of Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Soundgarden, she might be correct in her swift assessment. They indeed avoid the near-misogyny of an Axl Rose, the womanizing of a The Rolling Stones, and similar primal approaches to sex relations. But if one simply looks through the history of rock music, most does not take that approach. Metallica, whom she mentions, doesn’t even write love songs or songs about conquests of women; likewise with many other bands. Then there is the more romantic approach of innumerable pop rock singers, who actually sing of love and lust without any of the darker manifestations of those things. And then there is something else in grunge music that Camille knows nothing of; as usual, she is not well-versed in what she speaks of. Unfortunately for her theory, a little band called, Alice in Chains, is also considered a grunge band, and as anybody who has heard their music knows, much of it is anything but P.C. It is in fact sadistic, psychotic, controlling, dominating, and abusive, with an ambiguous, even ambivalent, relation to the female gender, which is often the target of threats of murder. Additionally, though somewhat off topic, Alice in Chains puts Guns N’ Roses to shame in terms of drug references and their accuracy. To be more specific, it is Layne Staley who writes most of these songs that are far from being genteel, that do not come close to the worship of the feminist woman. So, in this way, in her lack of comprehensive knowledge of her subject, she is wrong (2). She is not such a music lover after all.

Next, we encounter a phenomenon particular to this pseudo-intellectual. She resembles a politician in these cases more than a professor. She actually claims that “regular, everyday people” (i.e. the working class) stop her in the street and shout, “Give ‘em hell, girl!” The implication is that Joe Blow knows who she is and identifies with her. The odds are calling to me (3). How many working class Joes do you think thumb through her books at night? The idea is ludicrous, yet she wants you to eat it whole.

Now she shows her colors as a wannabe anti-feminist, instead revealing her utter hypocrisy, bragging about her earlier life. She says the time for confrontation was the 60’s and 70’s, then, unexplainably, brags of her violence toward men. She kicked them, punched them, and even broke an umbrella over one man’s head. (Remember the umbrella, just as the Rihanna love song occurs to you.) Now what is so morbidly hypocritical about this is that if a man had done the same to her, even in the 60’ and 70’s, before feminist law was firmly entrenched in the loathsome books of socially acceptable behavior, he would have been, if not imprisoned, reprimanded severely. Imagine little old me, large enough to kill a woman easily with a couple blows, breaking an umbrella over some girl’s head in public—or even in private, really (4).

Now this woman, who brags of being a strident bisexual, who even claims that all of us are bisexual (as you’ll see shortly), claims to be “an open lesbian.”(5) You’ll see a consistency to her self-negating contradiction as this study progresses, a consistent inconstancy.

Then again her words do not match her lack of action and her real alliances. We call this belying one’s true allegiance. She confidently announces, “The time for hostility toward men in feminism is over. It’s time to reconcile, to find common ground.” As if there were ever a need for women to be hostile toward men. As well as tempting cliché, she does not acknowledge that such reconciliation, and such reaching of “common ground” is not possible until the double standards legislated in stone in most of our institutions must be rectified, rescinded, removed, before the talk of truce in the gender wars can even begin. But what does she care of any of this reality that must be addressed by mankind? She’s a fucking happy lesbian. As long as she has another clit to lick, what does she care of beings with dicks? (6)

She choses to take up the subject of men again, a subject she knows a lot about for someone with her track record. She declaims that it’s the “21^st century—time to let men find their voices.” She also thinks the piddling men’s movement (which most men have never even heard of and which most men would be disgusted by) is a good thing, prattling, “It’s up to men to define themselves.” And what is worse, in her attempt at proclaiming herself a lover of the manly man, “We do not want men to be like women. We do not want castrated men.” Dear woman, who but a castrated man could deal with a violent woman (like yourself) without landing behind bars? (7) (By the way, my lovely readers, we haven’t reached the deep end yet in terms of her brazen dishonesty. The greatest claim though is not too far away.)

Like some sort of illiterate poet, she is in love with the mythological character of androgyny, and lays claim to it as one of her own dominant qualities. Of course, this is just more balderdash, but that later. Says our great professor, “The 60’s generation was about androgyny. We thought we could blur the sexes.” They thought, as she states, that the idea of male and female was somehow anachronistic. They were going to demolish these “patriarchal conceptions,” “demolish them.” Of course here she actually admits to being wrong, so we can not reprimand her for that. But what is a matter of some controversy and even mystery is the idea that the 60’s generation “was about androgyny.” Who does she think she’s talking to? Unwittingly she is telling a generation of people who more and more accept androgyny about how androgynous their phony parents were while they were dropping acid and trying to comprehend a single passage of the Bagavad Gita. So, in other words, she is simply overstating her case. The truth is that people, namely intelligent people, with whom Camille seems to share little exchange, have become much more comfortably androgynous than their ancient 60’s forebears. I’m counting this as a case of a lack of knowledge and research (8), and dramatic exaggeration.

Paglia, or should I say Palia, laments, “Feminism has not brought sexual happiness. The division between the sexes is even more fierce.” Well, what the hell do you expect? Half a generation of women turned into nagging psychos by feminism, many of them with more penis envy than Andy Warhol (one of Camille’s greats, yes), and you expect a friendly response from the greater sex? How ingenuous is this vacuous ejaculation of an ironically clueless mind? She’ll never admit the role feminism, her secret prize, had in this friction between genders (9).

And, although this won’t count against her filthy integrity, everybody should know that when Camille drinks she is “very malleable.” What? Malleable? I think she meant agreeable. She just talks too fucking fast. We can’t expect her troubled brain to keep up.

A grand claim is brewing, and here it comes. Says she, “In my deviant mind, I’ve always been able to understand rape, murder, and so forth.” Then, “I see with the eyes of the rapist.” Here she’s trying to claim some insight into what it means to be a disturbed man. Now, since she spends so much time with healthy men—no, no! She doesn’t even understand the mind of a sane man, much less that of a man insane. I think she deserves the electric chair for this act of patronizing assumption. Later we will find that she doesn’t even have a good grasp of crime in general, despite the fact that she at some point claims to own four TVs; there are how many true crime shows on cable television? Now there is even at least one station completely devoted to true crime shows; so all one needs to do to study crime is to turn on the television and sit and watch hour after hour to get the gist of what crime, including rape and murder, is all about. The understanding of crime and its various motivations has come a long way. The patterns have been thoroughly studied, even by amateurs like yours truly. And asking about a man’s motivation is like asking, “What’s it like being a man?” Well, what’s it like being a woman? Although I would never believe for a moment her response to this question, I must let this one go. No points.

She says she looks up to gay men because they don’t complain about dates, don’t cry date rape, and so forth. My reason for holding this against her will be shortly more clear to the reader. And she says these sorts of things quite often. Camille’s claim to love and identify with gay men is like a claim to love a fiction (10).

Another grand claim with no foundations. She thinks she knows more about young people (the date-rape crowd) than those “effete literati” in New York who’ve never taught a class in their lives. Why? Because she teaches freshmen. Well, did it ever occur to her that many of those big city literati have college-aged kids of their own? Or maybe they even have personal connections with young people of the sort she is speaking of. Two areas in which she seems to have no experience. No kids, no friends (11).

Now her ideas on date rape that run counter to the mainstream of feminism. Let me first say that it doesn’t even matter, for she has no interest in changing the official policies of institutions. You’ll find me bringing up the Duke lacrosse fiasco in response to her claims about date rape and her claims of her “reform” feminism conquering the “old” feminism. “In this period after the sexual revolution—we’re in a period where it’s not clear . . .” Yes, sexual liberation and obfuscation, two of a type. “Everyone” (girls, you mean?) “has to be very clear about communications, not just verbal ones (no means no—a stupid idea). How you dress, your body language.” Again, she speaks strictly of young ladies. All the feminist assumptions are there, assumption being an important foundation for feminism. Yet she claims to be beyond the old guard. Then she tries to shock feminists even more with the claim, “You meet somebody . . . in a bar and go to his house—you are consenting to sex.” Yet, if Camille’s brand of feminism has won, this brand she so aptly describes, then why the Duke lacrosse mess? These young men were convicted before any kind of trial and defense, and then they were exonerated. Where was the reformed feminism that should have been telling the girls (or girl, singular?) that they should have expected sex? That’s not how it worked, and you’ll never hear Camille speak of this scandal. Again and again, what about the evil spread by feminism in the form of unjust laws and patently false accusations? There is still no punishment for false accusation. Why? “To protect the victim.” My Lord and Savior, false confession is indeed not a victimless crime; the one accused is, in fact, the victim in such a case. So, where is his protection? The media is all over him, he is convicted in the news, and he even has the honor (according to Maude, in Harold and Maude) of spending time in jail. Once again, what a hypocrite bitch (12).

The reader will find that at times I must use reference to a speech viewed later as evidence of Paglia’s current ingenuousness. This is such a case. And originally I was going to let this comment pass as innocuous. Not now. She states, “I believe in seduction—going from a no to a yes,” only slightly disagreeing with Bill. The problem in this statement is in its acknowledgement of male power; although she doesn’t mention that it is the male that is the seducer, that is what she meant in the context of their converse. Well, at another time she argues that women have a definite power over men, even that men flee from this power to paint a canvass or write a story, or maybe to masturbate—who knows? This power that women have over men, a form of seduction no doubt, proves the superiority that women have over men. But if such a hierarchical relationship exists between men and women, in the exclusive way she prescribes, how could a man convince a woman to go from a “yes” to a “no?” Inconsistency arrived at through lack of integrity (13). Now, she goes on to acknowledge that she learned a lot about sex from the movies—no doubt she means heterosexual sex, right? No. At times Paglia makes the claim that Hollywood taught her all about bisexuality. Why? Because both sexy men and sexy women are depicted on the screen and some actors are even somewhat androgynous (Marlene Dietrich, one such example—really?). Yet she also claims that an Ava Gardner scene in Show Boat made her a lesbian. So which is it, Camille? Bi or dyke? No answer, just the whirl of words that jaculate contradictions from her mouth (14). Foreign films especially taught her sex. And, like her criticism of grunge for being P.C., she criticizes Maryl Streep and Meg Ryan, whose careers found their greatest success in the early 90’s—maybe a bit before and after—for what? For being so much less than the old-time beautiful and glamorous women of the big screen. Yet I find Meg Ryan far more sexy and fuckable than a Katherine Hepburn in her prime. In fact I find Ryan’s play at innocence and disinterestedness more attractive than Hepburn’s acting either the same or flamboyance and faux-intellectuality. I see Meg Ryan, and I want to make her cry in love with me. This, by the way, is a lesson for Camille as well as points against her; dear professor, you do not understand men, those simple creatures you think they are. The dirt on Hepburn’s (and therefore Camille’s) coffin is that Hepburn was far outmatched in her every play when pitted against a star of the charismatic caliber of a Carey Grant (in Holiday, for instance). This may be why she was later often paired with her (rumored?) illicit lover, Spencer Tracy (15). I might also mention that Streep, in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, actually resembles Dietrich in her cold and measured female sensuality, playing the bitch ex-wife. Her blank facial expression is a similar drag queen vogue (that of the model’s cold countenance) to the old Deutsch Dame’s. Although Streep may not be quite as sensual as Dietrich, say, in a similar minor role such as hers in Touch of Evil, Streep nails the sexy bitch type nevertheless, and someone like myself would like to fuck such a dyke out of spite, something I’m sure Camille would appreciate. But has Paglia, queen of pop culture and Hollywood analysis even seen Manhattan? If she did watch the movie was she hung up on what she considers Woody Allen’s ‘sensitive male’ persona, a false identification; in fact, Woody Allen, in many of his roles tends to play the beta male filled with a masculine aphrodisiac, attempting to compensate for his lack of appealing physical attributes with his perspicacity and cleverness, and his characters generally show a male lack of feminine sensitivity and sensibility.

Now, take a breath here. We have a million miles to go. Paglia claims (see a pattern here?) that fashion models have replaced Hollywood actresses as the new transmitters of glamor. Can anyone else name any number of Hollywood actresses that purveyed glamor in the past thirty years, despite feminist ideology (16)? Here even Camille contradicts herself; she is a lover of the great classicism of one Sharon Stone—yes, you movie-lovers heard that right. So I guess Camille forgets herself at times.

Camille claims to be bisexual but admits she’s best with women. I would argue that she is only with women. She admits to being a lesbian more often than she claims to be a bisexual (17). What is half a bisexual? Unisex. Figure that one out, if you will. She goes on to say, “I sleep with men, but I don’t fall in love with men. I’m lascivious.” Okay, she makes the grand claim again. Somebody smell something bogus? I do (18). And, lascivious? Too bad no one but your female students (or their equivalents in the world of art) finds you attractive. There’s even a funnier twist in the Bob Costas interview. Just wait.

The two of them, Bill and Camille, discuss Hollywood couples and Camille is asked to choose between the man and the woman. Guess who she chooses almost every time? Yep, the man. Tom Cruise over Nicole Kidman? What kind of dyke are you? Oh, Nicole must be unglamorous. Even “the gays” are gaga for Nicole; many of them might even choose Nicole over Tom. I’ll let this one go, since it is based on the presumption of truthfulness. Yeah! And Camille likes the louche, gigolo style of men. She doesn’t like men. Sorry, liar! (19)

You see, she assumes somewhere inside her feeble mind that we know she is lying. Say she, when she was a young student, she couldn’t find a date—they were all dogs, adds Camille. Note here that she is speaking strictly of women, dykes in particular, thus belying once again her claim of bisexuality (20). She then offers that many young girls now are jumping on the grenade and going down on other girls, almost glowing with pride. Then she mysteriously states: “I miss the golden age of lesbianism.” So, was the golden age the time you couldn’t get laid or some other time you haven’t even spoken of? Why would someone say something so blatantly foolish (21)?

Another Paglia claim—isn’t her ass sore yet? No, she pulls out another: “Women are naturally more bisexual than men. It’s a lot easier for women.” Okay, now I’ll have to bring out the old anecdote machine. Yes, confession time for yours. Although I have at times pursued women exclusively, there have been times when I jumped ship and fired my cannon for the other side. (I am one who must break every rule.) And I’ll tell you, men of many stripes (but not all, as Camille would have you believe) are capable of “getting gay,” of falling for the charms and attractiveness of another man. Perhaps if I were born more malformed none of this would have come to pass? But let it be known, a man must not be gay to engage in homosexual activities. Men are just as capable as—I would say more capable than—women of being bisexual. I would argue that men are even more attractive to their own sex, perhaps because of their physical endowments, their anatomy. And, by the way, even Camille prefers to watch male gay porn rather than female gay (lesbian) porn. This dyke is very much in love with the penis, in addition to her suffering of major penis envy. It’s funny later that she belittles the cock, when many times she admits to as much as worshiping the cock. Was it in Chasing Amy, Kevin Smith’s movie, that the buddy character says, everybody needs deep dicking? It is Faith No More, in their song “The Gentle Art of Making Enemies,” who argue, “You need something wet in your mouth!” Yeah, Camille, that’s you (22).

Quote: “I don’t think a lot of this current homosexuality is necessarily positive homosexuality. A lot of it is being caused by alienation between the sexes. I want women to turn back to men. I don’t want them to be exclusively with men. I want them to remain bisexual.” Now, there are so many problems with this statement (and I’ll count every reason as an act of dishonesty, or stupidity). First, as we’ll see, Camille does not even believe in positive or healthy homosexuality (23). She believes it a freakish phenomenon caused by psychological disturbance. Next, the idea that homosexuality is caused by alienation between the sexes is unfounded, other than in the case of feminists, who may turn to women because of their hatred for men (24): the fault of people like Camille herself. Then I’ll give her a point for immediately contradicting herself—I want them to be with men—no, bisexual (25).

“Men are shrinking,” bemoans Camille, as if she had any investment in the matter. “The more they do what feminists want, the more they shrink.” Not only does this fly in the face of her own theories of female superiority by their ability to control men through their sexuality (26), which will later be addressed in full, this is a boldly delivered false claim. The idea that flimsy, wishy-washy men, like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder, for instance, are the result of feminism is patently false. I argue that there have always been such men. As an example, Jimmy Stewart comes to mind (27). This is not taking away anything from these three talented men; it is just an evaluation of their public character. So, contrary to Camille’s claim, I would argue that, while women grow more aggressively anti-man, men, instead of bowing to these loathsome creatures, try to make their way in life just the same. The sensitive man is a myth that the media tried to use to infect actual men, and it didn’t work.

Here are her ideas of (exclusive) homosexuality (I’ll count each for its lack of verity). She does not see throughout history evidence of exclusive homosexual relationships among adults. Okay, if we don’t count the 20^th Century as part of history (and Camille doesn’t when it comes to the arts, her supposed forte), we first have Sappho, again one of her favorites, who is not known as a bisexual but as a lesbian. In fact, the island of Lesvos is known for its history of harboring lesbians, it being the eponymous mother ship of lesbianism. Next, those men who she is claiming to be bisexual instead of homosexual before the 20^th century, famous men such as Socrates and Oscar Wilde, were all but required by social norms to marry despite their inclinations. Are you going to tell me that Oscar Wilde was not gay? And what about Rimbaud? Michelangelo? There is only evidence for them having been homosexual (28). What is worse, she goes on to pathologize homosexuality, but that in a moment. She continues, telling us of ancient Greece and its men’s love of female prostitutes and boys (not mentioning that some of these boys were prostitutes); she goes on to extend this phenomenon to most of the history of the world (29), which leads it to become a fiction. Next she exults that she celebrated the glory of the penis on British television—this despite her participation in a movement that celebrates male-dismemberment or mutilation and the hatred of men, despite all her claims to the contrary (30).

Now to art history, which, she claims (notice the pattern again?) tutors one in the beauty of bisexuality. Why would she make such a claim? Simple. Both male and female bodies have been depicted as beautiful in works of art. Non sequitur, anyone? But that’s a matter of logic and argumentation, far below her dignity (31). Michelangelo, Sistine Chapel, a nude man reaching for God. Evidence enough? No!

Then let fly is a quote from one of her works, something to the effect: Exclusive lesbianism is emotional retardation. Let the pathologizing begin. Now Dr. Paglia is a psychologist of sorts, no doubt luxuriantly seated atop her armchair, and her defense is that it is not an exact quote. So, let’s get this down with mathematical precision. Lesbians are emotionally retarded. You regularly admit (notice, I didn’t say claim) to being a lesbian. So what are you (32)? An emotional cripple who sat on a cock once or twice . . . a long time ago. Add to this that she is disappointed with lesbian feminism. This from a lesbian feminist (33).

Maher gets in on the gay-baiting and is especially disparaging of male homosexuality. Her response is nothing—this even though she often claims to look up to gay men (34). This one really deserved two points. She continues with her theories. She doesn’t for a minute believe that anyone is born gay. Her working hypothesis is that homosexuality is an adaption to environmental pressures. This from a woman who at various times makes reference to physiology, hormones, brain science, and inborn gender traits. My argument against is that I have heard mothers who say that they knew their child was homosexual long before the onset of puberty. Apparently this is another case of Paglia’s lack of research, in particular her ignorance of what has been broadcast on television—and she has four of them (35). What kind of environmental pressure makes a man want to suck a dick? Hormones, physical and emotional attraction? The need for something wet in ones mouth?

Then she drags out her imaginary Freudian psychology manual, and speaks: “I don’t know a single gay person, male or female, who doesn’t have some peculiar relations to [his or her] parental figures.” Pathologize, yet truths you obscure. If she were capable of decent intellectual obfuscation, other than the mere lie that is, I might buy what she’s hawking. This is pulled out of space, the space between her, um, sideburns. So, every gay man has odd relations to his mother or father. I’ll save this one for peer review (36). This type of blanket statement is belied easily by the fact that different members of a family, even twins at times, end up on opposite sides of the gay/straight line. I wonder if she’s ever heard of the infamous Kray twins?

And then the mandatory self-contradiction. She says she’s celebrating homosexual expression (37). And she’s part of the Stonewall movement (38). Then she pulls out a piece of mysticism, declaiming curiously that she’s tired of blaming George Bush for everything “that comes down the pike.” Odd choice of words, lady. What? (39) (Nonsense point.) On another unrelated note, she believes in self-knowledge like Socrates. Then continuing with her pathological expertise, she prescribes all gay people to question, “Why am I alienated from the opposite sex?” (40) Wow, if she’s successful in her mending of the ways of queer folk, every hair dresser and his sister is going to get a nice piece of putang every night. No more alienation, people! This must stop! Can you imagine all the best lady softball players going from eating pussy to sucking dick overnight? If Camille had her way . . . You know I’m right here. Okay, now to Stonewall. She says that post-Stonewall the gay roles (i.e. top and bottom, butch and femme, or whatever other names you can offer) were not as important. (This is another one of those unfounded claims [41].) What else? She exaggerates the drag queens’ role in the riots. Her attempt at a form of hyperbole (42)? But she should know, considering she is Italian-American and the Stonewall Inn was run by the Mafia. Drag queens vs. the police. She repeats herself about the gay roles, “the butchy-femmy thing,” that became somehow more “androgynous” after Stonewall. But now she claims it’s making a comeback (43-44). Does this woman have any friends? Any sources? Anything?

You Hillary Clinton fans (I know there are many of you) will be happy to know that Paglia was a fan for years, until Hillary turned into a sort of despot or autocrat. (What country did she rule?) Then Camille gets a little dirty and says Hillary rode her husband’s coattails into power, and even gets indignant, asking, “Who elected her? Why was she put in charge of such a massive thing as healthcare reform?” (Of course, the Clintons failed miserably and ended up passing more conservative and globalist-friendly legislation than they did any liberal thing at all, but what is reality to Paglia?) Alert! There’s been a change of tune in no time flat as Paglia tosses off, “I think there’s a lot of Nancy Reagan in Hillary. In fact, they’re [the Clintons] a great power couple.” Yes, they worked as a “great unit.” Did she say unit in connection to Bill Clinton? Then a random ejaculation—from the mouth (you wish, Paglia): Men need to be censored [ . . .} There’s always a great woman behind the throne.” Okay, you’ve gone too far in to spite yourself (45), full circle, although with an irrational touch. Then to add pointless affirmation of her helter skelter ejaculations, she asserts with confidence (bravado?) that French courtesans were running the French court. When, exactly? She speaks with that machine gun fire delivery. And let us not forget that all the kings had syphilis. Wouldn’t this also mean that the courtesans had syphilis? I mean, I’m not an M.D., but . . .

Next, Camille belies her opposition to stereotypical feminism. “I believe in all forms of power. I believe in the bitch.” Yes, we know you believe in yourself, you fucking megalomaniac (more on this later). (46) She wrote an article called, “Kind of a Bitch: Why I like Hillary.” She can’t make up her mind on our dear Secretary, the psychopathic wife of a great psychopath. Twins they are.

My notes at this point suffer some of the delirium that Paglia inspires. She says something about sexual power and attraction, then says she’s been talking about this since she came on the scene (a favorite boast of hers, this coming on the scene). Unfortunately she prattles on about how feminists are not fair to men. At this point one should realize that Paglia is a feminist shill. She tries to paint a friendly face for ‘the new feminism’ that she advocates with no success and no intention of success. Paglia doesn’t give a damn about men (47). And it gets worse.

She mentions that poor sexual performance by men (i.e. the inability to ‘get it up’) is not okay with women, not acknowledging that women as well are capable of poor sexual performance, whether because of frigidity, inexperience, or some other cause (48). Then she plays her sympathy card on men (49), saying she also has difficulty dating (women, that is: 50). She continues in her patronizing attempt to win men over to the ‘new’ feminism, offering that ’95 is the year of the penis. She wants to bring phallic worship back (51)—following the gay male model (52). Well then, worship that cock, bitch!

News alert: Camille loves gay male magazines and gay male porn, this despite the fact that she can’t validate such individuals (53). Why? “Because it shows the beauty of the male body and the penis (in all its modulations).” Does she suffer some sort of heterosexed voyeurism aimed at homosexual men. Let’s pathologize like her. “Lesbians are incapable of doing hot porn.” (Too much. You earned it this time: 54)

Now “the battered woman syndrome” which she thinks fembots, or feminists, have made “too simplistic.” “I think there’s something going on both sides in a long-running psychodrama—women should have a sense of pride. The moment anyone hits you, you walk.” First, you have the typical situation cut off from reality; more women abuse men physically than men who abuse women (55). Second, you already spilled the burning beans, revealing that you yourself have been known to attack men (even with umbrellas: 56). To add insult, she reminds women, “Take the kids with you (57).” Here she reveals her true colors as a typical feminist; she does toe the party line. She’s a shill who can’t even consistently maintain her phony positions, her poorly manufactured personae. Yes, take the kids, send him to jail, get a restraining order, make him pay for your motherhood, and deny him visitation rights. Role call! Yes, Paglia is an ugly feminist of the only variety there is. She and Gloria Steinem, despite their need for backbiting, are in bed together. After all, she does mention calling the cops (58), knowing full well that even if the woman attacked the man, he’s headed to jail. Oh, the laws of feminist origin she does not oppose, despite all of her claims that the public and private life should be separated, the private life remaining exactly that (59). Next, Paglia plays the exaggeration card, warning the poor victimized woman, “You have a stage play going on . . . that’s going to result in your extinction (60).” Yes, because O.J. Simpson kills an ex-wife every other day. Reality getting in the way? Call Camille; she’ll help you overcome such obstacles. Then, as if to mollify what she’s said, she remarks that the woman is complicit in such situations. She never once, in all of her talks, mentions the brutal laws that have been lobbied into law by feminists, to destroy the lives of men; this omission is an admission to her guilt as a shill, the pretty face of feminism. To put it in her terms, she’s like the batterer coming home promising not to do it again (61). Camille loves tabloids. Not interesting, but no points for being boring.

After her prior talk of men’s abuse, she brings up one of her favorite fantasies, men’s helpless subordination to a woman’s sexual power. Ever heard of a little book called, Cary Grant Fucked Every Femme in Hollywood? No? That’s because he was discreet. Woman, you are so full of contradictions. If women were so sexually powerful, why would they need the help of outside agents? How is a victim in power? By this standard, Nicole Simpson’s sexual gravity resulted in her own death. Interesting idea. Who wins in that case? O.J., perhaps? No, he is still under the control of her sexual power; does he visit her grave a bit too hot below? Anyway, as a man, bastard creature of no merit though I am, I have had sexual power over many a woman. But that’s anecdotal evidence. Oh, evidence, something you don’t provide (62).

Boring aside. She likes football. I guess she thinks that makes her manly. But she studies the plays. Yes, she is a man.

Now on to the C-Span interview.

In Depth With Camille Paglia (C-Span)

“I’m one of the aboriginal feminists of my generation, the 1960’s.” Nope. Just before this she mentioned Amelia Earhart. What about Mary Wollstonecraft? And her daughter, a certain Mary Shelley? And so many more (63). The main part of the word, ‘aboriginal,’ is, ‘original.’ You claim makes no sense.

After she mentions that her family was mostly conservative and Republican and from upstate New York, she argues that she is unhappy with the polarization of liberal-conservative. She thought the 90’s would have us going beyond that. Says she, “these designations have long outlived their usefulness.” Really? So, if I’m conservative, I shouldn’t mention as much (64)? No, perhaps I’m something else entirely. And indeed I am, but you’ll never hear Camille speak of such things as the opposition of individualists to collectivists. I am an individualist; Camille is most likely a collectivist. If you’d like to know more about collectivism, look it up on Google; maybe watch a lecture or two. Let it be known here, simply, that both major American political parties are agents of the collectivism of globalists, thus cancelling any individualism, if it existed at all, in the system of Capitalism, of Democracy and the Republic. Oh no. Running with the idea, Camille claims that the Monica Lewinsky scandal re-polarized the nation. Wrong (65)! And stupid. Now healing, “The nation’s divided down the middle in a way I think it will take decades to heal.” All because of little cock-hungry Monica? Or is this another of your self-contradictions? Hmm, does she mean the first or second statement? Or both? What’s to heal, Camille? Do you know, my vixen, who the most undecided voters are? What they are? Oh, you’re a libertarian and you want more sophisticated labels. Which is it, again (66)? And she despises the current direction of the Democratic party. We’ll give her that. And I won’t even hold her to her word when she acknowledges being a Libertarian Democrat. But she voted for Clinton twice and then Nader. Liberal! Guilty (67)! Then she offers one of the stupidest pieces of political commentary ever: “The Democrats’ opposition to the Republicans is creating a culture war.” I could just as easily say, the culture war is creating opposition between Democrats and Republicans (68). The purveyors of truism must be revealed for the phonies they are.

Moving on, Camille tells us she was in love with heroic male characters. In passing she let’s out that her father was a high school teacher, never whispering a word that he was also a college professor. We’ll let this lie by omission go. Looking through childhood photos, it is interesting to note that she holds an umbrella in one, an object she later used as a weapon against a man. She blames in puerile fashion the failure of her comic-book-based childhood production of Hamlet on the lead player, who kept forgetting his lines. As this desultory path continues, we learn that Keith Richards was an idol of hers. Yes, that and, the 1950’s was a great time of sexual repression. Oh, and by the way, her father encouraged her to be whatever she pleased—and he taught her to defend herself. Where is your great oppressor, Camille? That will have to wait. But she wanted to achieve for women; she didn’t like the subordinate, deferential role; she liked the way men could speak out and challenge. She here lays claim to a constant clash with gender roles. Then she gives us a point, claiming that she identifies with transgenders of today—she understands what they’re going through (69, finally). No, you don’t. Your self-proclaimed androgyny was not androgyny but lesbianism and penis envy. There, an accurate case of pathologizing. She adds fuel by alleging that her book (or books) is a form of sex change (70). Beyond bizarre.

A cornucopia of ‘automatic speaking’ which includes such jewels as her love of English and the image, her experience in Catholic churches and an admiration of their iconography, her love of iconic expression and of Hollywood, the hundred voices with which she writes, the one with which she speaks, Sexual Personae as a monument of women’s achievement (more appropriately, Camille’s achievement); she gabs on that women don’t aim high enough (a criticism of the lesser sex as a whole: 71), that “men have for too long in history been the ones who make the epic statements”: then she asks, why are men better rockers?

Everyone should know Harold Bloom oversaw here dissertation in college, the kernel of her later book, Sexual Personae, which “took a level of persistence or mania I think few women have.” (Again a broad stroke against women: 72; even I am not this misogynistic.) She snaps that too much of academic feminazism was suppressing aesthetic qualities in art; what she means is that such feminazism didn’t recognize aesthetics; if art lacks aesthetics that means it is not even art.

Dear, Ms. Paglia, you are so easy to despise. Watching your concatenations of lies that you call speeches and interviews, I feel a complete lack of faith in mankind. You have no integrity, no sense of honesty, no dignity, no stance of responsibility—all you have is a brutally untruthful sense of self and success, a prevailing megalomania. Although I know you a complete phony, I feel I must share this understanding with others. I want them to know you are little more than a sly shill for feminist ideology, for the dogma you claim to hate. I vomit your name, with g included, with a sense of hard-fought freedom. Your lack of good faith and accountability is worse than any mere journalist whom I know. I hope you die with a flaccid penis in your mouth and a hammer up your ass, you lying dyke. The ice pick in your eye almost slipped my mind—what kind of aesthete can find any pleasure in such a hackneyed Hollywood turd as Basic Instinct?

Grand proclamation. It turns out back then Camille was a controversial figure in feminism (apparently she hadn’t yet let on to others that she was just a shill, in addition to being a hack). But now, oh now, practically all of her ideas are “part of the cultural landscape,” thanks to a younger generation of fembots who agree with her (73). What feminist positions does she hold? Pro- sex, pop, and rock. And women are not victims. All kinds of things now that people just accept (74)—if she were talking of people other than feminists, I’d agree; in fact, people accepted these things long before her kindling reached the bookshelves. More assertions by birthright: she created a “storm of controversy,” she admired Gloria Steinem when she came on the scene (who came on the scene, I’ll let go)—Gloria had a very “telegenic” face for Nazifembotism. Feminist supremacy of the 70’s turned against men—now you just turn away? Steinem inoculated women with anti-male bias while she was sucking cock. Says she something to the effect, to have men impugned as sexists and racists and brutalizers and oppressors was a terrible way to educate women. Yet you are a feminist, and this is still the way most feminists think—around the world (75). And yet my parents fell in love and got married during this period—I guess they didn’t give a flying fuck about femi-culture. As a note on the oppression Camille faced from feminists (76), they showed up to her early speeches to silence her, even throwing things at her, while she entertained her audience. As she would have it, people were tired of the P.C. of the 80’s and turned up at her speeches because of it—what of the continued P.C. beyond even the 90’s (77)? And where did all of these people go from there? Space?

Ms. Paglia then goes on to declare, as is usual for her, that she is against dogma, yet she offers it in spades, from her theories on homosexuality to her general condemnation of art beyond the 19^th century to her persistence that everyone is bisexual (despite her own lesbianism) to her claims made ad nauseam. What about her claims that essentially the old feminism must go down in flames as she re-erects the same feminism with her name appended thereto (78). She’s also anti-ideology, with a free mind and voice; she doesn’t belong to any group (feminism?) or circle whose ideology she’s trying to put forward (79). A real individualist? No.

Okay, now we have what has come to be known as her big quote on a female-run society; it goes something like: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” Now how does she explain away her finely tuned misogynistic masterpiece? Not always in the same way, for the quote comes to the fore quite often. This is how she tries to explain it away this time: Women are close to nature (and men aren’t?), ecological, from the beginning. We would be in dwellings made of perishable materials (don’t you love the literalism with which she addresses her own obvious hyperbole), organized around the hearth. “The whole impulse to build in stone, the impulse to break boundaries in the extended family, is coming from men,” men, bringers of the great migrations, the great monuments, the great risks. Yes, Camille, quite literal your interpretation of yourself. She is very much the fundamentalist preacher here, digging for holy bones. About as ingenuous as it gets (80).

Now, in case you didn’t know, Camille has a thing for Madonna. Here she alleges that a young generation of women came forward influenced by the slutty diva, who embraced their sexuality, fashion, and beauty. This is a tacit declaration that such “embracing” doesn’t happen naturally for women (81), as if this is something that must come from outside the girl or woman. If anything, Madonna—not to be confused with her lesser namesake—encouraged women to be more slutty, to wear their genitalia on the outside, as it were. They (her and Madonna) threw out the anti-male and anti-pornography, implying that pornography didn’t do so well in the 80’s (82). Another unfounded declaration. And, by the way, all “they” were trying to lynch poor Camille in the early 90’s for is over; the younger women have won. And what was the prize (83)? A message to the fairer sex erupts: Women must take responsibility for their own behavior if they are to be emancipated. What are the odds, Paglia? I’m afraid the brain isn’t wired that way. For women to take responsibility they would have to feel that they were responsible for something, anything (84)—and we’re not talking megalomania here, darling. Oh did you know we’re over the time when the girl gets her brother to come to punch out her date—yes, we’ve moved on to the police, you mealy-mouthed disinformation agent (85). Then she denies that women still run to the authority figure. What the fuck did I just say (86)? Oh, and women should be prepared to defend themselves—what about men defending themselves? Yes, that’s not allowed, you hypocrite twat (87). Dating, again? Women should be aware of what they’re advertising by the way they dress and behave; and she thinks women are taking responsibility. I think we covered this (88). Now, what does she think is seen as the sensible view? Free women must, again, be prepared to defend themselves. And men can expect a night in jail no matter what (89). Then she shifts the subject in a way she so loves to the psychopathological consideration, telling us that there are people like Ted Bundy, rapists, murderers, and what is worse, charmers (90). Again (my goodness!), with freedom comes responsibility—and, yes, she’s talking to women (91). It hasn’t dawned on her that women in our culture get freedom free of responsibility, that, in fact, it is the exceptional woman who holds herself to such ideals.

Get this, Camille thinks Ann Coulter is a brilliant lady (92), proving again herself stupid and dull-witted. She’s uncontainable, trashing genteel ladies on TV, over their inability to stomach Coulter (93)? What is worse, ladies and gents, she wishes Coulter were a college professor. Dumb to stupider (94). She then admits her ambivalence over the Clintons, adding that she liked Hillary’s book—while admitting that Hillary wrote it with help or didn’t write it at all (95). Yes, you would celebrate such dishonesty (honest when it comes to her love of the dishonest). But another of Camille’s quotes comes to light: “Anyone who stays married to an infantile serial groper deserves what she gets.” Guess what she does? Yes, you are correct. She talks her way out of it, claiming that she doesn’t care about people’s private lives, backing down completely from her statement (96). (Notice later when she declares that this was not a case of ones private life because Bill played hanky panky in his office. Yes, I am warning you of an impending contradiction.) Then Camille admits her adoration of Dianne Feinstein, a 3 1/3 term senator who has been not only the chair of the Select Committee on Intelligence, but who sponsored PIPA (bad taste, poor judgement, love of corruption: 97).

I must admit at this early point in the evisceration of Paglia that it is unfortunate that I did not come out solitary, sans enemy, with my own thoughts on women, feminism, and the gender game. I find it important to unseat this fraud, but I have my own pontifications (a word that implicitly contains the idea of dogma) on the subjects that run through this extended essay. As a man who has spent his few decades in close company with women, I have gathered plenty of insight into the female mind and even the female body. Camille, you will find, despite her lesbian/bull dyke status, seems to know little of her own sex. She knows even less of men. My experience, sexual and otherwise, with both women and men far outweighs that of Paglia, and unlike her, I am a man capable of insight and reflection. Additionally, as you will come to learn, I believe compassion and empathy, as they are usually understood, are particular to men and the exceptional woman. It is, in fact, unfortunate that no one has taken the time to truly analyze the woman’s mind to discover its distinctive features, its very feminine attributes. It is unfortunate that I’ll be required to define what a woman is not, while not completely delving into what I know a woman to be. At this point I’ll just leave it at this: the woman, to the chagrin of feminists, especially dykes, are hardwired for the purpose of maternity. Women are creatures of the world, meant to bring up children, and they are understandably quite shallow or superficial; all of this aids in the creation of their interest in and skill at bringing up children. The whims of women are much like those of children, as is their more or less monistic concentration on the self in considering all things. I’ll go into more detail when it is called for. But I warn you, you may prefer Paglia’s ingenuousness and lack of integrity to my frank approach to the female mind at some point, and you may be likely to call me a misogynist for speaking my piece, despite the evidence that it is Paglia herself who suffers that bias.

Really, if Camille were to approach the subject in good faith, considering all of her assertions and claims, she would advocate an end to feminism; she does not do so because she has an interest in the power structure of the movement. She does not wish good on men, for that is not her area of concern, despite her talk of liking men and giving men a place in the world. She wants to be in a position of power from which she authorizes the free actions of men; she’d like to give her blessings from on high, her sanctions from a house of power. But we’ll find that Camille does not want to redress the legal wrongs that have been made the burden of man. Additionally, her hopes for women are in vain, based on her own actions, which themselves are always overvalued, exaggerated. Let me end this little train of sundry thought with this note. Hillary Clinton, who holds the highest office of any woman in our country is not capable of regular accountability; she is silly and cannot contain herself even when she addresses serious international issues; she is lacking in insight and integrity. She cannot even pretend to possess the masculine traits of her male peers, however corrupt they be. Enough.

We’ll condescend here and allow Paglia’s pronouncement of herself as a pioneer in web-tech. She contributed articles to more than one online publication. We’ll also assume the content of said articles to be the tripe she propounds in her speeches. Soon, in a later work, I’ll show her published books to be frauds as well.

A Camille staple, she demands that the private and public spheres be separate, yet her group, the feminists have lobbied successfully for legislation that not only intrudes into a man’s private life but can indeed take that life, his family life, that is, away (98).

A caller into the program brings up the image of feminism she propounds. Let us agree, for lack of evidence to the contrary, that Camille’s influence on feminism is null (99); her ideas, or at least those she holds out as her own have no appositeness to the actual world of the feminist. She merely attempts to impress the reasonable among us of her fairness, without this fairness touching feminism itself. Again, she makes no attempt to redress all of the one-sided laws passed in the name of her movement, the movement she claims to have reformed, falsely.

Here is another favorite of Paglias that we could perhaps go into more detail about, prostitution. Sex-workers, whores, prostitutes, call girls, what have you, are, in Pagia’s mythological dynasty “demonized.” With such simple and nearly meaningless answers we must enlarge upon very little. Yes, prostitutes it seems are rather harmless. But to say they are demonized, we must also admit that their clients, or “johns,” too are demonized (100). They certainly have the law thrown at them when possible. Okay, Paglia also stands “in solidarity with prostitutes.” Yes. Do you stand in solidarity with the men who pay, who support them for their services rendered? Yes, these johns are demonized as well, both socially and legally. Paglia will take this argument even further in other talks, asserting that these dames have a sexual power over men. This is a favorite meme of hers, women having sexual power over men, and men fleeing from such power—as if they couldn’t just apathetically walk away from such phony power. This sexual power, which stems from the “mystery” and maternity of women, is so bogus in the form she presents that I must show how empty-headed is such an application of logic. First, both men and women have their innate sexual powers, which of course stem from sexual attractiveness, which itself comes in many varieties—the case of a Woody Allen should suffice for an anomalistic example. So, each sex having a varying set of attractive traits, no one sex can be said to be dominant when it comes to the heterosexual landscape. There are, for example, men who have fucked thousands of women; are you actually going to, with a straight face, tell me that such an incredible harem had, each member, power over this stallion? Of course not. Likewise with astoundingly beautiful women, who, whether or not they fuck a thousand and one men, have a palpable sexual power. To state my side of the argument more bluntly, do you really think groupies have power over rock stars? Yes, I’ll wait while you search for an extreme anomaly. By the way, she would argue this absurdity.

Next we have the incredible (please read that literally) case of the “Sexual Revolution of the 60’s.” Here I’d like to connect this revolution to others of its sort, like the French Revolution and the American Revolution (for independence), two battles that involved the slaughter of nameless and numberless enemies, while our Sexual Revolution involved pulling down your pants and perhaps wearing no underwear, maybe even some change in fashions and customs, and of course a healthy dose of illicit drugs. Paglia admits regrettably that the decade went “madly out of control”—again, bodies in the streets. There was, we shall agree, a conservative reaction, with the election of Nixon (not to mention the beginning of the neoconservatives, which Camille will never come to recognize). Soon, feminists and conservative mouthpieces joined hands in anti-pornography campaigns. There were even feminist ordinances later declared unconstitutional—no, really? Camille calls this movement, which insisted that porn causes rape, a “strange eruption of aboriginal puritanism,” thus avoiding any condemnation of her own church (101), and thereby creating an unforgiveable oxymoron, no something beyond that, a mere moronic phrase. To explain my condemnation of her bad usage of the language, aboriginal peoples had and have taboos involving sex but are not so against sex outright as the puritans were. The Christian insistence of head (or heart) over loins is a later development. “The New England puritan tradition” stated mere would be preferable. She goes on to describe the variety of puritan traits, and muses that she has no idea how we’re going to escape them. Hard work, discipline, rigor, and sexual repression—hmm, it would seem some of us have escaped all of that, at least the worst part—and some the better (102).

When she speaks of gay marriage (remember that she cannot even bring herself to legitimize homosexuality) she resorts to the usual liberal rhetoric, declaring that the use of the term ‘marriage’ is a mistake because of its religious affiliation; like all knee-jerkers she prefers, civil unions or domestic partnerships. Explain the difference, my dear demagogue (103). She should not even be speaking on the issue, considering that she denies reality to exclusive homosexuality (104)—even though it exists. And by the way, this canned liberal response to the question of gay marriage presupposes that gays should have nothing to do with religion, and also denies the great changes that have occurred in religion, Christianity in particular here, over the centuries (105). It assumes that gays can never be accepted into the body of religious persons, which is funny because in some churches they already are. In an attempt to justify her response (i.e. to try to separate herself from the flock that repeats the same thing consistently) she demands that religious intrusions into government process must be removed. Too late, Camille, you’re nailed to your Catholic cross already—look to your left, you may see Madonna crucified beside you. Not to stray too far, but it just occurs to me, why Madonna when there are far more sensual and authentic lady musicians out there, like Tori Amos, who all but penetrates herself on her piano while pouring out her Dionysian heart. Madonna is, was, and will always be everything Camille later accuses Lady Gaga of being, a choreographed artistic phony replete with artificial sensuality. I admit Madonna had her more authentic moments in the 80’s, but really, who is this femi-lesbo kidding? Not done with gay marriage yet? I guess not. “The government should have nothing to do with this partnership.” What? And, no special benefits. She is still trying to reconcile her knee-jerk position (106). The benefits of marriage, Paglia, have everything to do with government—and business, under the laws of government. I’ll use the word, claim, again. She claims that gays are making all kinds of unfounded claims, about living wills, about being escorted from the hospital or whatever premises. Her experience, I suppose, does not bear this out—wait! Has Camille had a dying lover? No! Must I call your bullshit here (107)? Oh my, just wait to hear the lies that fall from her face. . . .

Now the Paglia gets personal. She’s with a younger woman, an artist named Alison Maddex, who gave birth to their son. She talks about the valiant way she’ll bring up her son. She talks of Alison’s wonderful book, Sex in the City—I am not kidding. But its subtitle is An Illustrated History of Sex in New York, so . . . okay. Camille wrote the introduction. But stop everything! What we will later know is that Camille splits with Alison, making her an ersatz deadbeat dad, or maybe a mom-dad of distance (108). Why doesn’t anything ever work out? Now, what are the laws of visitation for mom #2? For Camille did adopt the child. So, dykes cannot be men in any of the better senses, but they can be like men in the bad senses. What happens to a child that grows up with only one mother? You did it to yourself, lady. Let’s not miss a beat though, for soon Paglia speaks of liberals and conservatives in the typical way, thus contradicting herself (109). Quit polarizing! Oh, “liberalism developed from the early 90’s doctrinaire beliefs to the more recent renewed liberalism.” What are you talking about? She supplies no details to back up her assertion, of course (110).

How many grand claims? Did you know that Alan Bloom (singlehandedly?) inaugurated the cultural wars (111). Although she agrees with his choosing of great works in teaching, “Bloom is limited in his belief of what culture consists of.” That is to say, he doesn’t throw in Madonna and Sharon Stone with Michelangelo. And, on another scholarly note, Camille appreciates the National Association of Scholars’ fight against political correctness, she is not a member; instead she is a proud part of the Media Ecology Association. Nice title.

Meanwhile Camille has a habit of dismissing Europeans from the American culture, the Germans and French, more specifically the Frankfurt School and the Deconstructionists. This wouldn’t be a problem if she also excluded a couple millennia of the best European artworks—not to mention a character like Simone de Beauvoir, hero of so many feminists (112). The fact that this never occurs to Paglia in her mentions of recent Europeans (and she does make some valid points) says something about her comprehensive mental abilities. I’ll say it, she’s not retarded, she’s just a girl. No doubt, I’ll face charges of domestic abuse by the time this essay is completed; maybe I’ll even get a restraining order against me when Camille decides to come after me with an umbrella. The sad thing is, the entirety of academia is filled with such frauds as Dr. Paglia. Her mentor Harold Bloom is one, Alan Dershowitz another, the entirety of artists and writers who consider themselves creative while holding to a college gig, and the rest. But let me concentrate on one phony at a time here.

As an alternative view of the progression of American history, relating primarily to feminism and homosexuality, between the 40’s and 60’s, I’ll offer a couple of brief notes. First, we’ll go back in time to the 20’s, where we see that homosexuality was more in the open in the speakeasy culture. Because do many crimes were already being committed, homosexuality often fit right in. By the time America entered WWII, many gays and lesbians went to war with other citizens; some of the female units were even known to be composed primarily of lesbians. Additionally some didn’t even hide the fact of their homosexuality while at war, although the expression of this must have been very limited considering most were just trying to survive the conflict. Throughout the war women in the country went to work, in factories and elsewhere, becoming largely self-sufficient. This is in fact a turning point in American culture, when certain men of questionable motives realized that the pool of American workers could largely be increased if women were encouraged to leave the home and go to work. Despite this, and despite a very short period of increased liberalism, there was a conservative response to the end of the war. Most women returned to the home, and men went to work, some of them receiving free education and training with the help of the military. Then comes McCarthy and the Communist scare. But notice that when the 60’s hit and things began to change—a liberal backlash, more or less—suddenly feminism hits the scene and takes on the mask of Gloria Steinem, a woman known to be a CIA asset for a good portion of her career. Just to give you some idea of how much money the CIA was giving to Steinem, Ms. Magazine, one of the early feminist publications, was a large magazine with no advertisements—this clearly indicates that she was receiving funding from parties with a vested interest. What would their interest be? Well, go back to what I said before. The corporations realized that by encouraging women into the workplace they could double their number of employees and therefore their production; additionally, the government realized they could vastly increase the amount in taxes they would receive. If this is not evidence of a conspiracy, for which feminism was a front, than no conspiracy has ever been carried out. Everything’s coincidence, right? No. Things happen because someone wants them to happen; change comes by the use of will in manipulating its subjects (or objects, if you prefer).

Feminism tries to force itself into the crowd of truly oppressed people, blacks and other minorities, homosexuals, and the poor. They tried as hard as possible to force themselves violently into the civil rights movements, and did so successfully. But just compare the words of the early feminists to those of the black movement; you’ll see a gap in the reality of the two movements’ complaints. Why was the CIA supporting the rise of feminism while the FBI attempted to destroy the black movement? Compare the woman’s movement to the gay movement—it’s ridiculous, the reality of the latter and the hysterical fantasy of the former. To be homosexual was anathema, while to be a woman, with a job or in the home, was just the regular state of affairs. It is interesting to recognize that gay and lesbian literature continued throughout the 50’s, despite the severe oppression. Were heterosexual lady writers opposed during the same period? Just to use one example, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, a very popular book from that time to the present day, was published in 1957. Simone de Beauvoir published five books during the 50’s and five during the 60’s. Even Gloria Steinem herself published her first book in 1957. When Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems in 1956, the small time publisher was charged with the crime of obscenity. Though Ferlinghetti was found not guilty, one must assume that the work’s homosexual content was a large part of the reason for the charges. Of course feminists like to think that their movement encompasses homosexuals and even other minorities, but such is far from the truth; they stand for women, and only women who agree with them.

The late sixties brought the reaction to the prior conservatism in the form of hippies and free love and whatever other elements. During this time fashion became more free, although one could not deny trends within the movement—people were generally not wearing just anything. Gays, once again, were allowed to be more gay during this period. Then Stonewall, which Paglia wishes she could claim as her own. Was she in New York City at the time? Likely not. Anyway, the Stonewall rebellion, in which gays, lesbians, and drag queens—not just those who were in the Stonewall Inn, by the way—fought back against police, who had the habit of raiding gay bars or clubs, and thus began the gay movement with a landmark event. According to sources, only four police were hurt in the riot, which was violent. The Gay Liberation Front was then established. Finally, a couple years later, homosexuality was no longer considered an illness by psychiatrists and psychologists—gays in fact attended psychiatric events, dancing and displaying affection in the midst of these professionals, and finally the establishment gave in.

Women, lesbians and straight, who didn’t agree with the feminist organization NOW’s stance that women were victims were generally expelled from the movement; this aspect of feminism, which Camille complains about, of casting out those who don’t toe the party line, was there at the beginning. But Camille, as a shill, puts a prettier face on feminism, swearing she’s against so much of it without changing anything about the movement. What does it matter if Camille does not dislike men when her movement hates them? I t is interesting to note that Bette Midler, early in her career, performed at gay bathhouses. Women, especially lesbian feminists, like to believe that before the 70’s women didn’t have opportunities, but if one simply looks through the history of the 20^th century this is far from true. Perhaps more mediocre female talents suddenly had more opportunity—I’ll give them that; the standards for women went down, so they could now join mediocre men in history’s house of shame. No longer did a novelist need to be a Jane Austin or Emily Brontë. Oh, that’s right, the standards had already been lowered; anyone heard of Agatha Christie? One of many female fiction writers before the 70’s who wrote works far from good. Just place her work beside that of Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle.

Unfortunately for the gay community, then came AIDS, which according to a science, which still gropes in the dark concerning the disease, is spread through sexual contact. Now, President Ronald Reagan had no place in his heart for the failing health of homosexuals—yet he hailed the diagnosis of Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnia., which, much like the Holocaust, is never be questioned, for fear of chiding if not career suicide. Does not one find it odd that, for someone so interested in sexuality, Camille seems to have no interest in the AIDS phenomenon. The closest she comes to mentioning it is laughing about the French nobility having syphilis. As usual, it took a famous person’s, Rock Hudson’s, death to really make the media take the issue of AIDS seriously. AIDS was a setback to the gay movement, no doubt, another reason to persecute homosexuals, male homosexuals in particular. While we’re here in the middle of a gay paragraph, is it not funny that Christian organizations aim to keep homosexuals from having equal rights in the way that feminists aim to keep men from having equal rights? Clinton, Paglia’s on-again/off-again hero, signed the Defense of Marriage Act; in fact most of the legislation he put his cum-stained hands to was conservative in nature. Let us remember that Camille, despite herself, recognizes the resilience and fortitude of gay men, who have faced, by my estimations, more oppression and persecution than women and Jews combined; and we’re talking a much smaller population, so I’m saying much more than you think I am. Of course I mention women and Jews because they are the whiniest bunch that mankind has ever produced; meanwhile feminism and Zionism have more political pull than most corporations, this in a capitalist state that leans more and more toward the values of the fascist, values which make corporations an inseparable one with the state. Let this brief interlude end with this: I, unlike Camille, not only recognize the uncanny strength of the gay man, I also validate the fact of his existence as a gay men.

This brings me to Camille’s theory of gay men and their relationship to “parental figures.” Now, say for instance that what she says is true, that gay men are such because they had no positive role model, or because their mothers were overbearing, or their parents had something against their child’s opposite sex, or that these homosexuals were even molested; does this knowledge make a person’s adult existence merely pathological, invalid, immature, as Paglia would have it? Even this notion is a non sequitur. Now let’s agree, if for the moment, that some of us were not born inherently bisexual or heterosexual, but homosexual. This would ruin a few of Camille’s theories; thus she has a vested interest in discounting the legitimacy of the exclusive homosexual. Now, how does she arrive at the conclusion that we are all either born or brought up to be bisexual? Because she herself at an early age tended toward bisexuality, perhaps? Before she turned to exclusive lesbianism. What if, like Bill Maher told you about himself, a person has no interest sexually in his or her own sex? Does this invalidate them in some way? And if it does, why don’t you pathologize when besmirching their character? The truth is that Camille has an ambivalent relationship with gay men; she both adores them (is fascinated by them) and denounces their ‘choice’ of life and living. This almost religious ambiguity, the love and hate of gay men—forgive the use of hate, for she after all loves them—leaves out the existence of exclusive lesbians (although she considers them, herself included, to be emotionally retarded) and heterosexuals. The fact that she admits to an adoration of the cock and of the male body leaves the story of her life even in a more ambivalent state. Why, for instance, does she deny herself the pleasure of coitus and of sucking dick? What about anal sex? All of these sources of pleasure, of getting off, that she has forborne. A man could make her climax in far more ways than a woman could, but she resists. So, my conclusion is that, if pathology exist, it exists in her in particular, not in the gay man, not in the heterosexual, not in the mysterious ‘lesbian other.’ Not even in the true bisexual, which she is manifestly not. She loves pornography; let’s see on the cover of her next book a scene in which she has a dick in her mouth. Until then . . . ambiguity, ambivalence, and egregious self-contradiction win.

Back to Paglia’s conversation, she bemoans the decline in education. Her concern is for the basics, reading and writing, and the book and painting. What could be mentioned here is that the US does not follow the European system of the hierarchy of education; in such a system, students are required to reach a high standard at each level of schooling. Students are introduced to the classics, to art, and to the sciences. Why would an American professor be unsatisfied with the quality of education her students received before reaching her classroom? Our system, instead of emphasizing excellence, traces the path of the normative. To excel in the American system is almost as discouraged as is falling behind. If ones potential is ‘too high,’ he must pursue it on his own. But this is America, formerly at least, the land of the individual and of ingenuity. For these exceptional individuals high school, and sometimes even college, are not of the greatest significance. One could actually realize another strange phenomenon in connection to European education; because it encourages the exceptional it also places an unseen limit, a “glass ceiling,” to borrow an overused phrase, on such exceptionality. Without limits placed upon the individual, there is no limit to advance. This said, with the lack of an academic or whatever pre-established social network, the individual must fight the system itself to find recognition, for our larger society itself does not regularly reward excellence. This paradoxical mantrap, the fact that greatness is as frowned upon as wretchedness, is just unfortunate—actually, it is tragic. Camille, of course, would argue that it took her decades to get published, despite her status as a professor; while I would argue back, and indeed I’ll show in my next essay on the lady, that her work is lacking in any kind of greatness—perhaps it isn’t even good. Back to the poor state of education, Camille believes in a global perspective in education—this after her complete dismissal of the Frankfurt School and the French Deconstructionists (113). Additionally she is against historical teaching and in favor of the chronology of education (a near-meaningless distinction), and she also disapproves of too much TV in the classroom.

Returning to one of her favorite subjects, Hollywood, she connects Katherine Hepburn with another of her passions, feminism. Then she proceeds seamlessly to gay men (114), who are the only folks interested in old films (115). Well, if A is always B, I must be B, right? No, it does not follow that B is always A. The silly non sequitur again. These cultural anomalies always love old films? No, she didn’t even make the original statement. Nothing against her there. If Katherine Hepburn was one of the women of the century, what does that say about women? Perhaps a topic of its own. But (like Camille) she had no children; she couldn’t bridge the gap between career and family (she left herself out of the equation:116).

About art say she, this realm is where one explores the ambiguity of gender. How often is this the case, my dear queen of declaration (117)? And the private realm is also explored through art. Yes. She’s not sure how we can “export this” to the public realm, and she worries as a student of history that every time a culture gets supposedly sophisticated (she’s talking Rome here, of course) and open and tolerant of alternative lifestyles—homosexuality, gay marriage, sex changes . . . Whoa! When before have societies had to deal with gay marriage and sex changes (118)? Anyway, such cultures are usually decadent and on the verge of collapse (again, like Rome). This is an area of constant interest and questioning in Sexual Personae, the subtitle of which is Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. She continues, although she admires decadence as a cultural mode, when conservatives talk about a homosexual agenda they’re right (119). Wait, what? Why are you blaming gays for decadence now? Now she bewails of our lack of biblical knowledge, a knowledge that seems to be slipping away (120)—she should really get out more. Of course she means among her students there is a lack of biblical knowledge. Then she returns to blaming gays for the ills of society, talking about “these trashy shows,” TV shows that is, gay TV shows (121) like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, which by the way, my ignorant dame, does not at all represent homosexuals in any kind of meaningful way. I’d say those men are not even gay; they are eunuchs. Who would fuck those nancies? Come on! They needed that show so they could pay for their sex. Apparently she doesn’t fork over the extra cash for pay stations; otherwise she should have acknowledged Queer as Folk and maybe Six Feet Under and The L Word. Of course she’s watched her share of Will and Grace, but has she caught up with The Sarah Silverman Program? And why does she mention the reality TV show that features gays and never say a word about how trashy all reality TV is?

Yes, back to our old maid, she worries about a massive backlash (conservative in nature, one extrapolates from this) because Christianity was that backlash against Greco-Roman Paganism. She’s worried that a progressive culture cannot sustain itself “in this flamboyant way.” First Christianity, which is garlic to my vampirism, was (and even is) much more than a backlash (122). Also, why again the emphasis on what is flamboyant? Is it not you yourself who celebrates bisexuality and androgyny (123), despite never quite grasping what androgyny really is? She thinks transgenders and gay activists need to ask these questions. She warns that “what comes after you may be far worse than what you’re fighting now.” Here she is losing it. Do you really expect gays to sacrifice themselves, what they are, for the future of your weak-kneed liberalism (124)? Not only does she overvalue the power homosexuals have in our society, she completely ignores the ill effects that feminism has had on that same society. Think before you speak, you undesirable tramp.

She goes on to toe the party line on criticizing W. Bush and his pointless wars, rebuking those who would make our country be thought less of by foreigners—as if Bush and his wars were not the very cause of anti-American sentiments. She cares not about truth, about the fact that he used the false pretenses of 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction to start the wars (125). What a typical coward. How many remember the lack of criticism from the media during the earlier months of war? Not even comedy shows would question Bush’s bellicosity, after their prior lampooning of his obvious idiocy. Camille suggests this same silence should be maintained by academics and intellectuals (here she’s speaking even of foreigners).

Maybe she could up the anti with her queer-baiting as a substitute for political commentary, much like comedy shows did. In this same strain she criticizes the criticism of the Dixie Chicks (126)—how very intellectual of you, Prof. She even goes on to blame anti-Americanism on Foucault’s influence (127), Then the good old “love it or leave it” sums up her further remarks on the unpatriotic (perhaps, true?) intellectuals (128)—who enjoy all the amenities without sacrificing their intelligence, I gather from her brainless rhetoric.

After so many of Camille’s claims to be a friendly witch, we still have man falso damnati crimine mortis. Man shall suffer eternally for sins he never committed. And Paglia gives not a care. The fact that she does not identify openly this dark side of feminism should be enough evidence that she is trying to skirt such issues. Man is always guilty ex ante facto. No trial is needed; he is the oppressor, the violator, the beast, the guilty—no charge necessary. Yet Camille heaps man with praise. But why? Does anyone really believe that she has no idea about this one-sided legislation with its double-standards? No, of course not, she is an educated feminist. So she plays you for her fool, thankful, I’m sure, that no one brings this up in her talks. If she were before an audience of working class men who were directly affected by these laws, who lost their families because of them, who were all but ruined by them, the story would be quite different. But she speaks to the affluent and middle class population, despite her claims that random nobodies encourage her, “Give ‘em hell, girl!” All of this is more lying on her part. Mendacity rules in a world of Camille’s preference, and she hopes no one like me comes along and points out her endless acts of disingenuousness. The bitch is guilty of a crime against mankind, of trying to hide the truth behind her various absurd theories and claims. Although she is not directly guilty of the criminal laws aimed at men, she is indirectly guilty of trying to hide those crimes through her subterfuge. The lordly sperm bank is being robbed of all rights while the cum-dumpsters win. Yes, her lies are brilliant in their way, even beautiful, but such action of a representative succubus should not go without punishment. Because I hold currency with the devil, I curse her vacuous soul over and again, wishing her the worst. The children, for instance, belong to the lineage of the man, not the woman, yet her and her cohorts in crime, known as feminists, turn reality on its head. Dear Camille, the patriarch is a man. What are you? The barren matriarch? What lies beyond your blouse, beneath your bra? Tits filled with poison whence your followers drink.

Now remember that Paglia was criticizing those who would question our President in a time of war, and especially those who would (like the Dixie Chicks) question the president during a time of war on foreign shores. Now Camille does what she loves to do—something others have not criticized her for, by the way—why must I be the first? Or am I? She turns around and criticizes the conservatives for saying what she just said (129). I swear, it wouldn’t be authentic Camille without the self-contradiction, her immolation through overcompensation.

Now on to comparative religions, a subject dear to the atheistic Camille. But first (forget that subject altogether for now), she criticizes Muslims for not protesting the events of 9/11, without the slightest sense of self-reproach (130). Forget that the events of 9/11 are completely unresolved, the 9/11 Commission being worse than the Warren Commission even, magic bullet and all. Well, why must Muslims mourn the loss of American lives when Americans as a group have never mourned the loss of Muslim lives, including those taken in Iraq and Afghanistan, but even those taken long before. What about the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children who died as a result of sanctions upheld against their nation before 9/11? What about . . . what about? Need I even say more? I mean, already there are hundreds of thousands of lives in the negative when considering 9/11, which involved a few more than three-thousand lives lost. Oh, but does the math matter? If the Muslims had been repentant for what less than twenty of them had allegedly done, would there have been no war in Iraq? In Afghanistan? You see, this kind of realistic thinking never occurs to a thinker as shallow as Paglia. She is a phony through and through.

The fact that she never faces off against a worthy opponent, as other more proven intellectuals (who are also academics) have, including her hated Noam Chomsky, who rarely backs down from competition, ironically, unless it has to do with 9/11. Anyway, the day that the events of that fateful day are seriously investigated and the culprits are held responsible for their actions, don’t expect a tear from Muslims. Sorry to go jihad on you, you insipid bitch. To add to the egregiousness of her debasing of Muslims, she latches on the by-now cliché argument that Islamic terrorism will be perpetual. First, such an idea has already been destroyed as a valid notion; only in Islamic countries does the terrorism continue unabated, in particular Islamic territories that are threatened by outside sources. And to add to this, since this trite interview, Americans and the UN and co. have used the members of the American-made organization, al-Qaeda, to good effect in Libya and Syria—I’m sure there’s more to come. The fact that her mastery of global politics resembles her mastery of gender relations should surprise not one of my readers.

After mentioning her book on poetry—which I will tear to pieces in a future piece—she mentions the horrid defamation of Rush Limbaugh (131), who himself makes a living lowering the esteem of various liberal characters. He also engages in ad hominem to an extent only rivaled by the Fox News network and other radio shows like his own. She also calls Rush a person of attractive imagination. Imagination is an imaginative epithet for this opioid junkie (132). No, he is clearly lacking in imagination, Camille. If you’ve heard one of his show’s episodes, you’ve heard every fucking one of them. Are you a nut or what (see, ad hominem)? She then argues that he’s not a stooge (133). Well, it is unfair that I currently have ready access to a dictionary, but having so, that is exactly what Limbaugh is, a fucking stooge. Stupidette Camille goes on to blabber about Rush’s golf game and the fact that he deserves his rest—maybe a bit more OxyContin, eh? He deserves it. But poor Camille is not savvy to such information yet. Of course she would take the easy road and avoid the subject altogether, so no one catches on to any others of her “controversial” frauds.

Finally she gets something right. The New Age movement is garbage. What she doesn’t mention is that the New Age movement is a reaction to all the political and atheistic garbage her generation spewed . . . for how many decades exactly? You convince the gullible masses that Christianity is a patriarchal and outdated system of domination, if not oppression, and should be abandoned as soon as possible—meanwhile arguing for the importance of bible learning and comparative religions. What do you think these gullible masses are going to do? They turn to alternatives to the religion that has been so demonized (then patronizingly appraised a darling of history, by Camille, who loves to cut off her nose to spite her dick—the dick she wishes she had, like most feminists).

And what does she do next? She throws us for a loop, abandoning her grand project altogether—no opposing it. She lambasts her own dead horse, arguing that the quest for sexual identity and personal relationships is somehow being pursued in a way “those things can’t sustain.” What (134)? Her entire spiel is in question, but she sees no problem with her declaration. And to add to this nonsensical mess, somehow this quest sustains itself? By resorting to such irrationality she has definitely won this round. The quest for sexual identity cannot sustain itself; this much is certain. But not in the way she intends. The quest for personal relationship though can never be said to sustain itself. Money, interest, invested care and tenderness—anything else! But why would the search—nay, the quest for relationship be forced to sustain itself? Nixon wasn’t this mendacious, nor this desperate for meaning where such does not exist.

The 60’s can be viewed from the point of religion—okay. No, not okay; you are not religious, so why do you morph into Jerry Falwell for an instant (135)? She is an atheist who advocates religion now, or should I say, as usual (136)? Then she gets all pantheistic on us, suckling at the divine dick of Nature. Romanticism was fun . . . while it lasted. Get over it. A pantheistic Atheist is an Atheist! Nature, science, cosmology sans God—Atheism! But we must, oh must we, return to the ‘fundamentals,’ the study of nature, again, of great books (uh, connection please), of religion (137). You see, she had to throw religion in with nature and great books. This is pure historical inaccuracy. Religious people do appreciate nature and great books, but form a religious perspective. This, of course, is not what she intends. She wants people to have the energy and interest to study all three from an atheistic perspective. Let’s take the old-time philosophers, for instance, who did study all three, in addition to studying so much more. Does she expect her students to display the ingenuity and intellectual compass of a Nietzsche, a Schopenhauer, a Hegel, a Descartes, a Kant? Not going to happen, lady. Such a student would assuredly spit in your face, either literally or figuratively, and perhaps write a critique such as my own, smearing your unearned credentials with the fecal matter they inspire in such a one.

Yes, again, you are the worst kind of fraud, intellectually, academically, and even in terms of pop culture—popsicly, perhaps. And what does she do, right after I mention European philosophers, she puts down European philosophers. Postmodernism, post-structuralism. What would the ‘modern’ world be without postmodernism (138)? Less than modern, that is for sure. Now she is talking like the conservative who thinks he can overcome the problems of the present by returning to the past. No, that doesn’t work. You overcome the problems of postmodernism by addressing its assumptions and conclusions then showing that there is a better, more inclusive, more true, more meaningful way of theorizing, of thinking, of anything. Anybody ever heard of the dialectic of progress? Well, think along those lines for just a moment, please.

This has to be the most telling of her revelations. She claims to be some sort of beacon of artfulness, of value, of insight, in the area of pop culture, including Hollywood and films, yet she loves a trite piece of derivative trash like Basic Instinct (139). She actually thinks this movie, especially Sharon Stone’s performance in it, is good (God forbid, great) art. At this point I recommend getting out more and, perhaps, forgetting everything that hack, Harold Bloom, ever taught you. Forget the true great film-makers, of whom Camille has no notion nor understanding, forget great actors who made movies worth watching and still do, forget anything great. Just watch Basic Instinct and listen to Camille’s insightful commentary. Yes, sarcasm. What’s wrong with this woman? Not only is she untruthful, she is vacuous and clueless. Put her in a room with Woody Allen and turn out the lights. She may learn a thing about art and men. No chance for this old broad. She’s just a hack, much like Bloom. A movie that doesn’t even warrant a second (oh, I want to say first) viewing.

Note, and this will count against her, her neo-Luddite (oxymoron?) tendency to place almost all worthwhile art in the distant past (140). Why is this? I can answer this succinctly. All the art that she likes from more recent times sucks. I needn’t go down the list; it can be found throughout the endless pages of this gruesome disembowelment. Now, collect your intestines and we’ll continue. The fact that art has actually improved in recent times, is better than that of the past, is lost on PaGlia.

Oh, a moment of clarity from a caller, who recognizes one of Paglia’s favorite patronizing man-bashing activities, saying, “men are good with their hands.” (141) It would be more true if she were to say, men are good with their hands and filled with endurance, fortitude, and ingenuity, while women are lazy, weak, unskilled with their entire bodies, and derivative in their thinking. Yeah, insults based on half-truths. Another caller eviscerates her, and as a response she takes the politically defeated way out: she agrees with everything the caller said, as if it were one with her own beliefs (142). Now, obviously this critical caller noticed differences, Camille. Otherwise she wouldn’t be arguing against your points. But Camille stands true in her loyalty to the way of ingenuousness, her mendacity only multiplied by her use of a tired political tactic.

Now Camille turns to ancient art, explaining the progression of man’s view of women through their artifacts. These two cultures she refers to saw women in completely different ways: the first depicted women with flippers and large breasts, the second, later culture depicted women in their true beauty replete with smaller breasts and all the rest. But guess what this hag does next? She argues against the existence of actual progress through the years (143), completely contradicting what she just pointed out in art or artifacts, and contradicting the knowledge of many superior intellects. Just because change isn’t always for the better, always an improvement on the past, does not cancel out the fact that there has been substantial improvement, that is, real progress, over the years. Who the hell do you want to be today, my dame of dishonesty? The multiplicity of your frauds is bewildering. As Quintilian is known to have said, “A liar needs a good memory.” Unfortunately for her, Camille is lacking such a capacity.

Now, in the course of receiving calls from viewers, one such caller caught Camille in her contradictions, wondering why Camille considers herself a Libertarian while she votes Democrat. We’ll let this go, for certainly there are some liberal Libertarians.

Camille makes known that she is a typical feminist, asserting her belief in the modern independent woman who is no longer dependent on a father or husband for her sustenance. Here I’ll light up an anecdote, for my mother has for a long time made a good living without the aid of my father, yet she accepts the largesse of her wealthy father. Does this make her less independent? No, it doesn’t; we are all dependent on someone or something, whether our boss or our husband, even our students. But we already know of Camille’s true beliefs, her unflagging faith in the great feminist ideology. Despite her every claim of being male-friendly or opposed to extremes in feminism, she toes the party line in reality. Then she crushes the petty complaints of her own femi-group by describing the child labor of the 19^th century; surely these children suffer true oppression, not the piddling pseudo-oppression of modern women, who are far from oppressed by any reasonable standard (144). Children forced to work all day in the horrible conditions of industrial factories versus women encouraged to raise their families—is there any sanity in this woman and her ingenuous ideation?

Another common theme, she bemoans the disaster that is the Humanities on college campuses. I, for one, think the Humanities should be thrown out in favor of Aesthetics, but I guess most would know that. She mentions the ‘lost generation’ (are those the young ladies who follow your ideas?), then on to ‘campus reform!’ (145) Yet, feminist reform is the way things are. Why Camille rarely feels the need to elaborate on her claims and assertions, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s her strange female mind, not so prone to reflection, more favoring claims. Is she unconsciously spouting words? One seriously wonders. If she would just try to explain herself, she would be so much more often prone to bouts, however random, of verity. To say the current generation is ‘lost’ does not say anything. Was Paglia’s generation not lost? Has there been a generation which systematically rejects the label, ‘lost?’ The truth is that, on college campuses, much of the stupidity comes from such ideologies as feminism. You have a major percentage of women in college; is that not victory? Why do I not give her an extra point for status as a feminist shill? She tries to put a friendly face on feminism while agreeing with all of its basic tenets and in the man-hating, family-destroying laws that this movement has successfully lobbied for. Yes, the laws are still in the books.

Nicole Simpson comes into view. Never blame the victim—obligatory feminist propaganda. Never blame the victim, but Nicole . . . no, she shifts the subject in her desultory way to murder in general, then torture and child abuse (146). Why the sudden move from Nicole to murder in general—and child abuse? A lack of mental clarity, perhaps? And it’s to be assumed that the victimizers are men, of course. Soon she argues that police should not be brought in, through restraining orders and so forth. Yet, the laws are there, and they are yours (147). She surely knows that when the police get involved the man is fucked. Then, instead of addressing the double-standards of the laws (148), Paglia suggests, as she will again, that by involving the police the woman can get herself killed (149), thereby adding to the image of the man as victimizer. Yes, all—no, let’s leave it at most—men are psychopaths, ready to dish out death to the poor unsuspecting woman. Yes, you took my kids, now I’m going to end your pathetic little life. How often does this actually happen. Not very.

Now she plays her handy ‘slide rule’ again, shifting to psychology and psychoanalysis (that most outdated of practices) (150). Academic theorists tend to admire the theories of phony psychologists who have no obligation to help their patients. Then she goes into sexual symbolism, asks what people look for in sex, and peters out in a mention of abusive relationships. She returns to Nicole and O.J.’s control over her. Yes man as the successful control freak—I guess this trumps your belief in the female control of men through sex, at least for the moment (151). If O.J. had such control over his ex-wife, doesn’t this dispose of the idea that she rules him sexually? No, Camille would probably suggest that this in some abstract way bolsters her theory of female sexual power, despite the fact that there was no sex between the two at the time of her death—or one would suppose. She declaims, adamantly, that the abuse will always continue. Psychological control comes to the fore, this time a man’s need for psychological control being tied to a “mother complex.” (152) Okay, first we know this is coming from the direction of Freud, that most psychopathic of doctors, such a coward and incompetent that he wouldn’t touch schizophrenia.

Now, let us examine, if you’ll allow actual elaboration on a claim, the idea of the “mother complex” in relation to the male need for control over a woman. The man in this case would seemingly be transferring his need for control in his relationship with his mother, dead or alive, to his prized woman. So, in other words, his mother was a controlling bitch. Even if we assume such armchair psychology carries any weight in the classroom of reality (not just Camille’s classroom), we must admit that such obsessive control of a woman is caused by a woman. This is a case of the abuse of a woman leading to the abuse of a woman. The fellow is the middleman. The wife is a proxy for the mother—it must be Oedipal. The man was over-controlled, his identity “obliterated” by the older generation (153), that is, his mother. Now, anyone who has ever heard O.J. Simpson speak knows that his identity was not destroyed, so, unless this is some code for another thing altogether, the theory is incorrect. Simpson has identity, has personality, has pride and arrogance and all of those other human traits. The fact that O.J. is a psychopath, and is therefore not representative of men, never enters Camille’s ideas on the matter. This seems to be a far more important psychological point than any kind of Oedipal I.D. destruction.

Now to sexuality: we cannot, she claims, ask any psychological question about the development of a gay or straight identity (154). Yet she does this all the time. Cite her theories on bisexuality and her invalidating of both hetero- and homosexuality as anomalies caused by social pressures or psychological problems or whatever other wacky theories this woman choses to espouse at the moment.

Moving to art, she declaims that art is a source of self-knowledge and self-discovery. This claim is so generic it can be said of anything, i.e. philosophy, politics, religion, volunteerism is a source of self-knowledge and self-discovery (155). Not only is this a case of silly truism, it is shows a lack of understanding in the area of art. Art, in case you couldn’t make the connection for yourself, is artifice. A couple simple definitions of artifice from a portable dictionary: 1. : Trick; also : trickery. 2. an ingenious device; also : ingenuity. You see, art is fiction, fake; beauty is fake. It’s a trick, the better the art the more well-honed the skill in such trickery. Aesthetics has very little to do with psychological maladies or self-realization, although it is perfectly capable of representing such in art. The creative mind is the source of art, is the source of beauty; one can say of a woman that she is beautiful, but indeed a woman is made how much more beautiful by the deceptions of art? Ever seen a model in street cloths, without all the makeup and dressing-up?

Then again, as an unforgivable shill, she pretends to be against regulations of personal relationships (156). She perhaps refers here to her own relationships, which involve two women. (Oh, just wait to hear her strangest, most self-contradictory claim.) Yes, the man-hating laws on the books make it very easy for a woman to punish a man by the simple use of a phone. Thus the man, like the B-movie serial killer of some deliberation, must be prepared to disconnect or hide the phones as a concern of self-preservation. Sorry bitch, the line is busy. By using such ingenuity the man forces the woman either to act the part of the sane human being or to run into the streets and shout her hysterics. Yes, ladies and gents, the man and the woman are two completely different creatures, as Camille will shortly inform us with her inane interpretations of brain studies, with the handy help of her complete lack of experience with men. We are in for more presumption than man has before known. Just be patient; we’ll get there.

Camille almost fools me into thinking she’s going to come clean and admit what she really believes, at least in reference to guns. But no. She swears she agrees in a citizen’s right to bear arms, then proceeds to water down the statement with images of hunters in the country; she then implies, with some show of worry, that people in the city should not be granted the same right to own a gun or, God forbid—guns.

When questioned about how much of her audience is male, she declares (as her ass has informed her) that “men like to call.” Such is the reason more men than women have called in to the C-Span broadcast. This is nonsense, of course (157), based, as most of her claims, on nothing. Let us be informed that she has received many letters from women “driven out of graduate school” in the humanities. Why? Of course, because of the trash offered by Post-Structuralism in place of real literature and art (158). Last time I checked one is allowed the freedom to choose his own subject of interest when planning his dissertation. Maybe she is referring to college courses offered to such students. I must say she is out of date in her estimation of the hold that Post-Structuralism and Theory hold over university or college studies. One can certainly study the classics if one so desires. Just because such theories, however distasteful, hold some position in the studies of the humanities does not mean that they overrule other theories completely, if at all. I would say that the problem with Liberal Arts in college is the denial of the true worth that is at the heart of all things great; the Humanities and creative writing courses are just as bad, if not worse, than Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Theory or Literary Theory.

Common source of interest, she brings up her “coming on the scene” (watch her slide into the picture) in the early 90’s. She alleges that she spoke for men in a way that hadn’t before been done—then she mentions others who did the same (immediately contradicting herself: 159). Perhaps the speech of these others was actually authentic. She soon admits, as is her habit, that the world in which women could be so free (or name you platitude) was created by men. She goes about patronizing her dear men, reducing their contributions to mere physical things, physical labor, dirty work (160). Yes, Camille, my gentle creature, forget all the great intellectuals, almost all male. The fact that there are any female intellectuals at all (Camille does not count; she is a fraud) is remarkable, considering all of the traits of their sex that they must overcome or come to understand. This somehow segues into talk of her favorite example of good capitalism, the family that employed and took care of her family.

Here I’ll mention that Camille displays a difficulty with memory—for which she fails to compensate, with a pen and pad of paper perhaps. When more than one question is asked of her, she answers the last question first and then either forgets the rest (sometimes being reminded by the interviewer) or glosses over earlier concerns.

I seriously question the extent of her appreciation and knowledge of art. She professes an Italian love for opera, thereby seeming to situate opera in such an exclusive environment. You’ll never hear her mention Wagner, he beloved of Germans forever, and recognized by knowledgeable musical theorists as an important innovator in the realm of composition. But composition, that all-too-male of occupations fails to stir the vaginal juices of Camille. She mentions Dickinson again as if she were the greatest of poets, which she was not, even when compared with her contemporaries. Will Camille ever mention a great artist that still has flesh or its remnants attached to the bone? I understand these types. They can only find greatness where others have long said it to be; then they contradict their supposed love for greatness with the admission of more contemporary artists who appeal to them, artist who are at best mediocrities.

Italian-Americans beware The Sopranos, a show which lampoons the Italian working class in Jersey. Meanwhile Camille considers The Godfather a positive portrayal of Italians; yes, murderous psychopaths are great role models (161). Insane? Yes. To suggest that any of these types of media productions are accurate portrayals of Italians or even mobsters is foolish. Need I explain that the aim of art is not necessarily the imitation of reality? No, art, especially movies and TV, aims to entertain and to impress itself on the consciousness.

Let’s take account of Camille’s all too feminine love of approval. All but a couple of callers begins with a complement. We see your feminine underbelly, Paglia. She already admitted, by the way, her love of attention to the extreme of megalomania. And who doesn’t know this about women, that they like complements and praise a bit too much? Too much for men, that is, who often don’t give a shit what another thinks of them. And I do rely upon self-knowledge to know much about men; as one known to be somewhat despising of the notions of others, one even known to be somewhat malevolent, I enjoy the hate and criticism I receive almost as much—no, more, than I like love or compliments aimed my way.

Oh, this world of a woman that I must piece apart. If only I could click my heals. Shortly, we are back to Theory (or Literary Theory), which, if you don’t know what it is, is a poor substitute for aesthetics (the valuing and appreciation of art), that generally studies ‘texts,’ as things of interest in a more or less social way, perhaps touching on cultural implications. It is no good, to put it simply. And yes, it is based in part on theories of some French philosophers. Camille says that Theory is waning. She also mentions that she was disgusted by Foucault’s gay admirers, who trashed generations of great scholars. Yes, Foucault is one of those French philosophers blamed for Theory. But why the disgust for his gay followers in particular? She calls some group trendy careerists—the Theory folks? Then she goes on to list her hated French culprits: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and de Man (as we will later figure out). The fact that she throws all of these theorists and followers, most of them nameless into a grandiose bonfire is a bit helter skelter (in both ways?), but we’ll let all of this go for now.

She goes on to claim that Derrida was a Nazi sympathizer (162), or that such was revealed at some point in her imagined history of intellectuals. Of course, this is not true. Derrida is a Jew from North Africa, and the actual controversy he was wrapped up in involved his having an ‘African bias.’ He was also accused of rewriting the same things as Jorge Borges, and accused of nihilism. A few critical obituaries were dedicated to him. Later we learn that de Man was actually accused of being a Nazi-sympathizer. Okay, now say they all were Nazi-sympathizers, like Heidegger (who was actually a Nazi). What does it matter? If what they wrote holds up as good philosophy, it shouldn’t matter; this is a confusion of political morality and the truth of philosophy. Such distinctions are obviously beyond a sophomoric thinker like Paglia, whose femininity seems to thwart her every other attempt at intellectuality. To proffer an obnoxious example of what I’m getting at, what if Hitler’s finest Nazi scientists discovered a cure for cancer? Would it matter that they were Nazis in the scientific evaluation? Well, the truth is that it was Nazis who were largely responsible for NASA’s success after World War II; they helped to develop the space program. Because they were involved should we trash all of the great developments that came as a result of the successes of the space program? Enough of the weaknesses in Camille’s cogitation. She then proclaims that Jacques Lacan was influenced by feminism, leaving us to guess whether this is a good or bad thing, and Foucault, well, “He was a god!” She proceeds to attempt to show the weaknesses in Foucault’s thought—hmm, somebody else’s thought? And she throws a cherry on top with the declamation that Theory left the humanities “in a wasteland.” Thanks, T.S.

Now on to more personal public issues. Camille was expelled from the first college at which she taught, Bennington, after a fistfight with a student (163). Uh, so it’s okay for Camille to engage in violence with her students, but not for O.J. Simpson to argue and fight with his wife? She also admits to having kicked a student at some point during her time at this school (164). Violence seems to come easy to Camille. Remember that she’s even used an umbrella as a weapon against a man. So, here we have the typical stance of feminists; it’s okay for women to resort to violence, but if a man so much as raises his hands to deflect an oncoming attack he can easily end up in prison. The double standard that they can’t admit to, or if they do, they can justify it.

Camille goes on to, like Ginsberg in “Howl,” profess that some of the best minds of her generation were cut down by drugs. This is an arbitrary claim (165). Her friends could have just as well went on to indulge in even more drugs or to commit crimes, or, what the hell, to start world War III.

Now she does something which may seem odd to those of you with a memory. She reaffirms her belief in Western progress (166). So, which is it Dr. Paglia? Progress or none? Some? What? I honestly have never heard a single person contradict himself so much; ‘herself’ explains it all, considering that women don’t believe in the significance of consistency, or verity for that matter. But we’ll get to that when Camille pulls brain science out of her cornucopia of malleable knowledge.

She reaffirms now her respect for violence, calling the Hell’s Angels “American cultural models,” and praising their unique lifestyle. Oh, listen to me; I’m so fucking negative (167). Well, such thugs aren’t much different from her beloved Italian-American (Sicilian) mobsters. No surprise that she likes even more violent men. Fuck it if this highlights her tendency toward self-contradiction. Fuck it all. Inconsistency is the sign of a strong and healthy mind. Is that a Nietzsche quote? It should be; he loved to fuck with weak and credulous imaginations, for whom irony and high sarcasm are a foreign territory. Black humor, anyone?

Back to schools, children are arriving, says Paglia, at schools with discipline problems. How bizarre that this is also how they arrive in prison. Of course, these feminists will not admit that they have a clear bias against boys, who, by their standards (female), will always be a problem. If only boys were born without the masculine nature; it would make the lives of teachers and scholarly disciplinarians so much easier (168). Typical feminism displaying its desire to put all students in feminine trousers. Sugar and spice and everything nice. Fuck you, bitch. Let’s go for a ride. When was the last time you went camping? I’ll be your longed-for bogeyman, broad. For those of you awaiting my novel, The Hag Who Haunted Hell, take it easy on me; I have so much work remaining on the docket.

I will not allow you to forget the Luddite (neo-Luddite, what an oxymoron, and an echo) tendencies of Ms. Paglia. She speaks of the strict conditions of schools when she was growing up (in her androgynous days, that is) (169). She talks of parents shirking their responsibility, and then goes as far as to imply that parents no longer teach their kids before they arrive at school (1700—oops, 170). First, I don’t buy this notion. Second, if women are neglecting to teach their children the essentials before reaching school, maybe, just maybe it’s because these mothers are too busy working, living the feminist-issued lifestyle (171). God bless the working stiff, shouts Michael Douglas in Falling Down. Yes, equal opportunity in the workplace, that rallying cry of feminists, sometimes equals inequality at the beginnings of a child’s education and, perhaps, an unfair deal in life. My mother was a housewife the first six years of my life; my siblings and I could read almost as soon as we could speak. But she suffered through my father’s constant habit of working. Poor soul. God bless the working stiff!

Yes! It finally came out. Yes! Jennifer Lopez (172), that cinematic and musical genius (no laughing, class!), was influenced by feminism, of course. Who the fuck wasn’t? The monster has its filthy female fingers in every pie thine eye can spy. Celebrated here is Jennifer’s ‘control over men.’ (173) Yes, I bet Ben Affleck is in tears over this Puerto Rican slut. “How will I ever find another vagina attached to a pretty woman,” moans our poor protagonist. “Oh yeah, I’m a fucking movie star.” The tears evaporate as Affleck calls up the entire cheerleading team from the local high school, then takes his pick of the litter. And this! Her ‘marketability.’ (174) As if that feat is something to be admired. It implies, and rightly so, a lack of talent being bolstered by a gimmick. Just like your favorites, Camille: Andy Warhol, Madonna, and Sharon Stone. I almost forgot the soulless Mapplethorpe, whose nude images do not even exude an ounce of sensuality. Let’s just wrap this up. Camille coins the stupidest of phrases for Jenny, ‘street-smart feminism,’ and never does she let out that Jenny lacks any meaningful talent. Yes, Selena was an okay movie, but nothing to praise as Camille so flagrantly does (175).

To be true to her ‘gender-bending’ tendencies, our heiress of all things art bemoans the feminine concerns of female politicians (176). Why she thinks women must not be women when in a position of power is no mystery. This simply reveals Camille’s own sense of inferiority, or sense of the inferiority of women (again, she tempts misogyny). But I argue, are women really inferior, or are they just women? Is it a sin, for instance to be seen in the cosmetics aisle in a store? What about the feminine hygiene aisle, heaven forfend! Does every lady politician need to display the unwomanly habits of dykes? Come on, lady! Hillary Clinton is a psychopathic monster who puts even her husband to shame in terms of diabolic personality traits. Do you want that to be the paragon for powerful women? Notice I didn’t say she can equal Bill’s sinister charisma and manipulative mastery. Along similar lines, Paglia swears that women should be trained in military history (perhaps she means, military theory, or perhaps, strategy)—well, let’s just see how that works out (177). Why doesn’t she start by having women sign up for selective service? Women in the draft would certainly be a move towards equality.

Now she latches on to the meme, “the age of terrorism,” that grand endless war dreamt up by horny neoconservative Zionists in need of constant conflict, a world at war endlessly (178). But she has no knowledge of the whence of things. Her talk along these lines is very serious, very unquestioning—very womanly, in that feminine patriotic flare. And she’ll never come to address her mistaken ideas in the future, for as I’ll say a million times in the purest confidence of truth, women do not see time in the same way as men. They move along a continuum of events; there is no contradiction because what one is today is what one is always, what one is in the moment, or for the moment; what one was or will be is not a matter of concern. Even the way a woman interacts with others follows similar lines, one face replaces another, but they are merely the Other. Yes, differences exist, but not when one is completely in the present. There is no difference between what one sees now and what one sees now; what one saw or will see is not a matter, once again. For constant change along a whimsical continuum is the rule. Yes, women can be intelligent, even geniuses, but how useful is that when all of one’s interests are in the sensuous present, lacking in the reflection that weighs difference with objectivity—what is the worst, lacking in accountability.

Such traits, I must say, are not true of every woman; some women transcend the limitations of gender, much as men do. It is an a priori mistake to expect accountability from every woman; one should observe the ‘second’ sex more closely instead of assuming a common mental functioning. It could be argued that Camille studies the past, the history of art and literature—but, I say, but, how does she look at these historical artifacts? She sees them while moving along that same continuum. And let’s not confuse this with some profound philosophical concept or any silly religious ideas. I mention all of this now, out of place, too soon, because it explains much of Camille’s contradiction and ingenuousness. Other than the fact that she has a collection of canned points of speech, one presentation bears very little on the rest. Even within one presentation, from topic to topic—or even sentence to sentence—there is no requisite continuity. Camille is a woman and should be regarded as such—yet, for the sake of this extended study, we assume a false equality that feminism claims—you see, claims. Camille goes from claim to claim without substance to back up her claims; she knows that most people will be uncritical of her speech and will either overlook or dismiss her hauteur and hubris. I’ll finish with this: if the present is the only reality, and such is the norm for many a woman, for she cannot escape the constant interruption of sensation into her thought processes—if the present is the only reality, even when regarding memory and history, there are no contradictions. When things change not in a meaningful progression, but more in a morphing sense, one thing replaced by another, the sense of continuity, of thought or otherwise, is very different. What is truth to one to one who does not see the solid side of life? This also leads to opinions in place of truths, for opinions are understandably changeable, while truth is something very abstract, frozen in the continuous flow of time. Therefore, this examination of Camille’s public appearances is itself a fraud because it holds her to male standards of scholarship and intellectuality. But we are worlds away from a conclusion, so let’s allow for this misapplication of an all too masculine reasoning to a character foreign to its precepts and assumptions.

What follows is the most unforgivably flagrant betrayal of any kind of intellectuality; she actually lets the cliché leave her mouth in full: “President Bush has restored dignity to the White House.” Okay, this trite soundbite, which goes beyond the pale of anything that can be called intellectual (179), is just outside of my own expectations of this she-wolf. She builds on this by adding that Clinton “treated the White House like a frat house, like Animal House.” Nice to know you have some grasp on rhetoric, a little hyperbole, yes. Shame, shame. Wow! Writers have been killed for less. And you are it. If there is a vapid intellectual climate, you are it.

In an interlude here, I must comment on Camille’s general lack of knowledge of the underpinnings of society. From experience, I know this to be common of academic types as a whole. They just look at the surface of our seeming reality and believe in it much as children who trust their parents. It never occurs to them that corruption runs through the entire system; they don’t bother looking into the brand of this corruption and the many forms it takes. I mentioned academics, but I must admit that intellectuals even outside of Camille’s academe tend to be clueless of the actual corrupt workings of government, of business, of economics, of war—you name it. One should at least have a vague idea of the obfuscation taking place; indeed, Camille is a part of it, a shill for feminism, making a good living pretending to oppose her very foundations. The fact that fascism is quickly becoming the norm in our government and in corporations, which cannot even be separated from that government, is ignored by these great beacons of our society. Academia and the press, the publishing ‘industry,’ all media, all of it is in such bad shape because it lacks the integrity that is required to uplift what is good or even better. I am not taking evil here, I have no bizarre conspiracy theories to sell. Yes, these clueless persons are looked up to as paragons of achievement and excellence; this is a grave mistake. To be sure, Camille mistakes her academe for the world of intellect, and in turn intellectuals mistake general knowledge for reality. Paglia, like so many others, but more egregiously lives in the dark when it comes to the sad state of politics in the past century or so, likely longer. This credulousness and outright stupidity should be held against them all (180).

Camille is a woman, and as such she is prone to being duped by silly male poses; it is precisely people like her, especially women, but also weak men, who allow disgustingly malignant forms of government to take root. She admits to liking George W. Bush’s Hitleresque gestures. She is truly impressed by this beta male (181), this failure as a human being. Now, before you call me a silly liberal, understand I have very little good to say of Obama and Bill Clinton, even less of Hillary, who to me is the most monstrous manifestation of political depravity we have known since Kissinger. Of course, Kissinger had more style, and a more complete grasp of his own psychopathy.

Don’t flinch. Paglia’s back on the coattails of pop culture, bemoaning its ‘precipitous decline.’ Sorry, dear. When one looks at its history with an eye for verity, one sees that pop culture has always been garbage; it has simply gone from deplorable to unbearable, and people love it (182). It’s the implication that popular culture was at some time admirable that is completely incorrect.

Who would expect it? When questioned about her thoughts on Kobe Bryant she slides sideways immediately to talk of the bogey man, serial killers and murderers (surprisingly failing to mention Ted Bundy this time). Back to the question, she is upset that the woman (the victim, in feminist terminology) was not believed over Bryant in the media, that her character was questioned. Here she contradicts her outrage over Steinem’s stereotype of the woman as a victim (183). Why? I guess she couldn’t help herself; when confronted with reality her hardcore pose dissipated. Where is your reform, your emphasis on responsibility, your admonitions to young ladies about the rules of dating? And to add to her feminist zeal, she comments with a malicious pride that Bryant’s endorsement deals have been damaged (184). Yes, he deserves it, right? He must be punished in some way . . . because he is a man (yet Camille will not admit to her feminazi bias, shill she is). Not guilty of rape, but guilty nonetheless—of manhood.

About Ayn Rand, she sees similarities in their styles of writing, probably their bold claims that have no basis in truth. She lays claim to Nietzsche, stating that both she and Rand absorbed the great Deutsch Philosoph. You see, I already had an eye out for this connection, for Nietzsche as well loved to make grand claims; the difference is that Nietzsche had a world of knowledge, truth, and understanding behind his ejaculations. The idea that either Rand or Paglia actually ‘absorbed’ Friedrich Nietzsche is ludicrous; that Paglia cribbed some of his style is unquestionable (185). Paglia here drags in Simone de Beauvoir (remember, she has no place in American academe for Frenchies: 186), perhaps by the proverbial hair, claiming superiority over her and Rand. Why is Camille superior? Because unlike these trite atheistic bitches, this atheist bitch doesn’t dismiss religion altogether. As if she’s in a position to grant concessions (187).

As I may have mentioned, Paglia provided commentary for Basic Instinct, no doubt planting profound ideas where they don’t belong. What kind of intellectual? What kind of art aficionado (188)? Then she adds some sugar to this tasty treat, proclaiming the greatness of Sharron Stone (189). Are you stoned? Yes, the greatness of a woman who is capable of playing the part of an annoying bitch and a nag—and a cock tease, no less, something I’m sure that rubs Camille just right.

This is the point where the caller informs Camille about her mistake in declaring Derrida a Nazi-sympathizer. He also schools her on postmodern philosophers and even those who practice Theory, explaining to her that they all took the foundational philosophers, philosophers important to history, very seriously, Kant, et al. In true narcissistic fashion, verging on the psychopathic, she defends her blunder, by elaborating that Derrida was involved in controversy pertaining to Nazism (which is untrue: 190). Let us note the classic understanding that a woman never likes to be wrong—or maybe I’m thinking, ‘a woman scorned.’ Nonetheless, let her squirm in her loss. I’m sorry, it wasn’t a controversy, it was a scandal “in its own right.” Nope.

She goes back into her anti-French American academe shell (191). Why contradict yourself so soon, lady? It’s inappropriate, thinks she, to have Americans read French texts in English translation. Lacan was already labyrinthine in French, argues she, adding that the Post-Structuralists wrote of problems “that were never the case in America.” This from a woman who thinks students need a more global perspective.

She continues, offering that there is no canonical tradition in America—unless you are an artist or critic who actually knows his shit, that is (192). She also argues that there is no fine arts tradition, which holds much more water than her previous declamation. She returns to the Frenchies, arguing that anybody who thinks that Foucault is learned does not know what learning is—quite a claim. Then she swears these types have not done their history lessons (sorry that applies to her as well: 193).

Now she shines like the goddess she is. She is such a good shill that she pisses off run of the mill feminists who pose as writers (194). Additionally she alleges that Theory will be rooted out in another (one more) generation. In the real world, Theory never had a hold; even in academia Theory has already lost most of its appeal. Theory is a red herring; the real problem is people like our Dr. Paglia.

Oh my, Molly Ivins makes a good reflection of the work of Camille: “The sweeping generalization is [Paglia’s] signature. In fact her work consists of damn little else.” Maybe Camille has been outfeminized?

At this point in the program, C-Span allows for the host and Paglia to take a short break. Meantime they post bullet points about Camille:

Paglia’s Bullet Points on Herself:

~Dissident Feminist (read, feminist shill: 195)

~Libertarian Democrat (read, Democrat who wants you to know little of her personal life, and certainly doesn’t want to be held to the same standards as men: 196)

~Pro-military (read, whatever the status quo requires of me; or, a woman must be pro-military to be considered for presidential candidacy, but is still not required to sign up for selective service: 197)

~Avowed Capitalist (sounds right, a believer in a bygone system—but don’t tell her about it; ‘I’m easily distracted and like the sound of my own voice’; she’ll never comment on the fascist laws enacted nor the fascist bailouts, although her dream of a negro president did come true.)

~Anti-Establishment (This is something a zealous teenager would say of himself—notice I said himself; credit where due; really though, how can a college professor be anti-establishment; really, she’s trying to suggest that she is against typical feminism: 198)

So, we have arrived at a valid insight about feminists through Paglia’s description of herself: women who try to be men end up looking like boys. Now, more of Paglia’s bullet points on what it means to be Paglia:

~Atheist admirer of religion (I’ll give her this Nietzschean knockoff.)

~Free-Speech Militant (Unless you don’t toe the party line and avoid criticizing the president in a time of war—especially overseas: 199)

~Pro-pornography (We’ll give her this; the lady loves gay male porn; we must take her word for truth, despite the poor odds of that being a good choice.)

~Defender of Strippers, Prostitutes, and Drag-Queens (But not a fan of perverts, johns, and avowed [exclusive] homosexuals: 200)

More Bullet Points, this time Role Models/Influences:

~Katherine Hepburn (Yes, a heartless starlet who despite her best efforts couldn’t hole a candle to Carey Grant or Humphrey Bogart, much less the great Hollywood actors.)

~Andy Warhol (This is just so telling; vapid or vacuous, choose your poison; proof that she knows little about the value of good art: 201)

~Marshall McLuhan (Yes, pop culture; perhaps, the role model for her career.)

~Harold Bloom (Her teacher or overseer; a man of very little literary insight and no understanding of aesthetics. He also had a grand concept to hang his hat on: the anxiety of influence—as if writers are intimidated and tormented by those who came before, inspiration a foreign concept, one supposes, to this man.)

More Bullet Points, Favorite Writers:

~Shakespeare (Easy choice; the bard. Bloom’s obsession, a writer nowhere near as good as they say he is.)

~William Blake (Again, easy choice. Although he managed to touch excellence a few times, some writers in translation would be better.)

~Emily Dickinson (Camille needs at least one woman; she chose the wrong one. One of the most overrated writers of all time.)

~Oscar Wilde (The witty playwright and British ‘sexual deviant.’ Great choice.)

~D.H. Lawrence (Another homosexual. Camille loves the gays, but doesn’t believe they are gay—or won’t forgive them for being so. No sexual attention: the true reason women dislike gays.)

Back to the interview, Camille defends herself against the commentary of Molly Ivins by using her handy political tactic, saying basically that they are very alike and that it was unfortunate that Ivins found reason to defame her. Then why is Ivins so critical, Camille? Because she agrees with you? As a final defense of desperation she claims that Ivins hasn’t read her Sexual Personae (202).

For whatever reason Paglia has the idea in her head that she is considered mainly a writer overseas, outside of the States, and that she could teach at any university abroad. Megalomania international?

Another revendication grande, she swears that Harold Bloom is seen as an apostle or evangelist for high art (203) at a time when the National Endowment for the Arts did everything possible to trash the artistic image, to alienate itself from a mass-audience. Yes, you should know by now that Harold Bloom was a horrible hack. Additionally, the idea that good art (forget the best) would naturally find a large audience is just silly and out of touch. In reality, mediocrity thrives, as anyone can tell from the response to movies and popular culture in general. She seamlessly lays into another revendication grande (hey, I’m running out of variations), that her students have never seen a timeline before they come to her, a patently ridiculous idea (204). Continuing in a similar vein she swears that there is an image of an ‘austere hyper-intellectual’ for the academic, humorless, and stodgy (I guess). Anyone with university experience, however small, knows this to be untrue (205). What about the attractive ‘milfs’ one often discovers on entering a classroom? How about the flamboyant lovers of art, of words? What about the sexed-up old priest who takes a liking to the eighteen year-old ex-altar boy who sits in the front row and makes the Father’s cheeks all rosy? How about the anarchist dyke feminist who has it out for all the males in the class—and probably gets fucked by a few? Reality in its various shades and forms . . .

Check this one out; it’s a case of prompt self-swallowing. She first reflects (forgive the usage of a word so foreign to her temperament) that racial profiling is inevitable, meaning its bound to happen because of the nature of police work and criminal types, then she goes on to describe with disgust incidents of such profiling, declaiming them un-American. That was quick (206). It’s the good old ‘I love myself, and that’s what I hate about me.’ Perhaps that will be the title of my next essay, on Paglia’s works, A Lesson in Self-Contradiction: A Critical Review of the Works of a Fraud. But we’re not done here. She makes a logical faux pas, saying that some of this racial profiling, which was occurring on the side of the road, “was an attempt to humiliate and intimidate other drivers.” She, of course, means ‘to humiliate the people on the side of the road and to intimidate other drivers.’ She makes such slip-ups a bit too often; and please don’t say I can’t handle ambiguity or some such nonsense—she really fucks up.

Continuity of opinion is not always necessary, but to contradict oneself so often is unforgivable (207). After earlier attacking those who criticize America and the president (and the war, of course) for fear of galvanizing foreigners against our country, she criticizes the Democrats for not opposing Bush. We’ve already established that the war in Iraq began in an atmosphere in which no one, not even a comedian, was allowed to criticize W. It was really as if their media careers were on the line.

Now she says something she should regret and contradict pronto, but she doesn’t alas when it would come in handy. She declares Condoleezza Rice a great mind (208), explaining that this woman is “able to handle the mic,” able to handle the media. Of course this leads to mention of future female presidents. Condoleezza is cultured and a role model, demands Camille. “Future woman presidential candidates should study her.” Yes, learn for yourself, young ladies that you are a woman, and therefore integrity and truth and all the rest of that masculine bullshit doesn’t mean a thing to you (209). No wonder feminists eschew you, even though you’re a great shill for their cause. You give feminine intelligence a bad name. Now, I do not break to another paragraph here because I want you to contrast what she just said with what she is immediately to say. “Noam Chomsky hallucinates about foreign policy.” This in addition to having a distorted view of reality. She even claims she’s “going to take the high road” in revaluating Chomsky, then she continues to cut him down with all the means at hand. Okay, remember what she said about Rice, then compare that with her assessment of Chomsky (210). Now, I am not a fan of his, but I know he is at least a light-year or two ahead of Condoleezza. But we wouldn’t be finished without a mandatory intellectual suicide, would we. In contradistinction (contradiction) to what she just proffered, she states, “Noam Chomsky’s views, which seemed absolutely delusional, now seem to have a ring of truth.” Why? Because of W. (211) and his wars. Take a breath, more inanities to come.

Matt Drudge. Yes, Matt Drudge of The Drudge Report. “[O]ne of the great independent voices of our time.” (212) Yes, he rivals Mencken; no, he doesn’t even rival a Christopher Hitchens (whom I loath[-ed]). Hah, hah! What is worse: “He is the web!” (213) She enjoys visiting the Report throughout the day; she even goes on to laud this questionable character and throw in some of her Claims. To tail this silliness, she reports solemnly on the greatness of Andy Warhol (214). Yes, a true master—of what?

The Luddite returns. “At a time when fine arts are not producing anything particularly interesting . . .” Such statements say more about the compass of her knowledge than about the reality she attempts to emulate (215). This is a woman who couldn’t recognize great art . . . (take your pick, and make it raunchy.) I still can’t get over her love for Basic instinct. I thought it was already settled that the movie was a turd. Unlike such a Meisterwerk as Instinct, Waiting for Godot is “one of the great misogynist plays of all time.” Why? It doesn’t include women (216). Much like an all-male gay bar. How about lesbian bars? Notice that she doesn’t even try to back up her Claims; I guess they’re not paying enough for that.

Camille now Claims that Hollywood offered what avant-garde culture couldn’t provide (217). Apparently Camille has never heard of the great 20^th century French painters. The best American poets? One wonders if she’s heard of Eugene O’Neill or Tennessee Williams, who, by the way, contributed to Hollywood (218). Hart Crane, E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, John Steinbeck, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robinson Jeffers, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, even Kenneth Rexroth, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and some of the Beat poets? Anyone? Or maybe that’s not the avant-garde. Has she heard of Kafka? Oh, he’s foreign.

Another mention of that gilded sub-par pornographer, Mapplethorpe (219). Really, her love of Mapplethorpe and Warhol is just telling. Great art needs a champion, Camille. You are not it. I must reflect on her poor evaluation of art. Her appraisal of art resembles Theory’s examination of texts. There is a complete lack of aesthetical understanding; there is no application of values. Yes, she can explain the symbolism of whatever unimportant and unimpressive ancient artifact, but cannot tell us what is good in art. She is clueless. Then she Claims that if only the museums would supply a brochure to its viewers on the history of transgression and offense in art it would help the public understand the art. Here she again shows a vacuous understanding of art, of aesthetics; where is the sense of aesthetic value (220)? She never once mentions the fact that this ‘offensive’ art that abused the government funding of the arts sucked as art—it was horrible; say it!

What comes at this point? Her defense of feminism, a movement which she claims “comes and goes,” surges and subsides, and is here to stay. The final statement is true; the rest is lie (221). Then she declares it a part of the legacy of Western culture. And then we feel shame. A caller makes a fine point: “Feminism would not exist without the benevolence of men, and feminism is one aggressive stroke away from extinction.” Yes we are working on it, dear caller.

Now the banal and solemn declaration that civil liberties are a product of Western individualism. Close enough to a truism to sound sleepy. Then she claims ‘it’ goes back to the ancient Greeks (222). No, it doesn’t, unless you’re talking civil liberties for the few and far between. Next we hear mention of Mary Wollstonecraft (though not by actual name—it must escape her) and her daughter, Mary Shelley. But skip that because the modern industrial capitalistic system allows women to be freed from “the drudgery of housework,” and from dependence on husband or father. Really, when was the last time housework involved ‘drudgery?’ How did soap operas gain so much popularity? Because women were busy with the pains of housework? Then she finally agrees with our distinguished caller that “in some sense” (yes, in some sense, meaning, in every sense) “feminism is the product of male achievement.” She proclaims two strands of feminism: the Puritanical (the bad) and the extreme and extravagant theatrical strand, libertarian and pro-sex, that our Camille belongs to (the good). She elaborates, adding that there are arguments within feminism, mentioning that she was pro-sex in the 60’s, and the pro-sex wing lost ground throughout the 70’s and 80’s, but it encountered an enormous resurgence in the 90’s. We’ll take ‘her word’ for it. Really who cares about any of this?—my non sequitur.

Now she hurls her energy full blast into her spiel on feminism. To move point by point through her own feminism, let us remember that she often plays at being a friend and ally to men (223) without ever addressing the grievously damning laws etched in the books against them by the volition of feminism. Why the silence on the issue of this man-destroying, family-destroying legislation (224)? She speaks of domestic violence, often in the form of famous black men, while she herself professes a violence she committed against men (225). She also speaks of a need for separation of one’s private and public life, which none of these men are granted (226). She’s trying to put a smiling face on the enemy of mankind—feminism. Yet she hasn’t changed feminism one lick with her positive attitude and all of her revolutionary fury. Nothing has changed! She is a phony! A fake! A menstruating sea of mendacity for all (the first part can be thrown out at this point). And that is what she has to offer. Just remember that the shill himself has no actual power except in his disinformation, his counter- or false- intelligence. And she again reiterates that her brand of feminism is ‘pro-man’ (227). In what way, Paglia? It is also, says she, pro-heterosexual relationship, this from a confirmed lesbian. All lies! “That strident feminism you’re thinking about is gone,” she swears (228), with no proof of anything of the sort. In fact, all feminism is anti-man, anti-heterosexual, and therefore anti-family.

Plainly we know at this point her talk of art is idle chit-chat that cannot find a home in the 20^th century (229). It goes from ancient to medieval to Enlightenment and Baroque to Romantic, and then it jumps to contemporary garbage, with only a couple exceptions thrown in to hide the fact of its limited trajectory.

Back to First Ladies, Camille avows that Jackie Kennedy (why not call her Jackie Kennedy Onassis?) was “undermined by the extent of philandering by her husband.” She married well, is Camille’s incredible comment on Jackie. Yet while confusing the two in her speech, she never adds that there is just as much evidence for this aspect of his life as there is knowledge of his actual murderer (230). She goes on to say that John F.’s legacy suffers from his affairs. Where is the least evidence for this? He is considered by many to have been one of the greatest presidents, despite his many political controversies (231). She indulges in idle banter. Even Kennedy’s speeches are more oft-quoted than those of Lincoln, that great presidential orator.

Then she does something very stupid. She criticizes Michael Moore for his staging of scenes, something many clueless people like to do. Staging of scenes has always been and will always be an essential part of documentary making just as much as any other sort of movie making (232). Perhaps bad documentaries rely on the strictly spontaneous. The most regrettable thing about this common criticism of Moore is that there are better reasons to criticize Moore, his knee-jerk politics toward the top of the list. She, of course, is most likely a defender of the knee-jerkers because they share her general political views, i.e. they’re on the same team.

Then she commits her worst act of self-contradiction, an unwitting act at that. She says there’s no room for dishonesty and deceit. Wow! Busted! (233) I think this is the best of her ignoble acts of ingenuousness. The pot and the kettle. But where is there no room for dishonesty and deceit? In the New York Times or in Hollywood. (234) She actually said this. I’m not pulling this out of the air. She is actually this stupid. To put it plainly, Hollywood is a land of make-believe, you twit. I must forthwith “deplore and condemn” Ms. Paglia, and with no ceremony (as if I weren’t).

What does this social engineer say next? “If we could free up the education system from social engineers . . . “(235) Hmm. What are you? A feminist? What is feminism? A form of social engineering that favors girls. Oh, the ingenuity of the ingenuous! Let’s stop with the silly forced notions of equality and the sort of small-scale affirmative action for girls, which has led to the completely absurd notion that girls are smarter than boys. Who gets all of the attention? Who all of the unearned credit? I laugh at all of the idiots who desire to say girls are smarter than boys—after I’m done fucking with her mind and then making her cry. Read the actual work of college students and see where the intelligence and insight shows—nine times out of ten it will be in the work of young men. Sorry, Camille. Corruption breeds what . . . Stories about cats and boyfriends? No, that’s what young college girls beget.

She, in her muddle of verbal thought, mentions that there is a close connection between England and India. Well, no shit. How about the connection between England and the US, Canada, Australia, even Israel. Oh, she must make America seem very “insular.” (236)

And who is still teaching about evil America, dear Camille? Dumb feminists perhaps, but few others (237). Perhaps those who know what is evil about America. Too simple?

Now she attacks public education unexplainably, stating that most of it, including college, is a waste of time. “Kids are bored.” What? (238) Yeah kids, just forgo the whole college thing and strike out on your own in the land of opportunity. Stupid. Then she makes the mistake that England/the UK is currently making, stating that there should be a return to trade schools. Yeah, I bet she wants that, so we can have even fewer men in higher education. Yes, when you recommend the recipe for disaster, you get a point (239). Now what? “Kids need help learning how to housekeep” (sic). And on and on. To sum up, there’s a need for more practical education because we all know how difficult money management is (240). Then, as another stupid possibility, she recommends that parents send their kids abroad before college. (Yeah, Camille, not everybody makes as much money as your “working class” parents. Just in case I haven’t let the cat out of the hat yet, Camille is the first person in history to have a working class professor as a father.)

Next she does what she loves to do, to pathologize the landmarks of popular culture. She swears that the Columbine massacre was a result of (get this) boys being penned in school. “They need to do something.” Yeah, I’m sure you’d have them in shop class all day (241). It just couldn’t be psychopathy. Again, too simple.

Flashback attack. While lauding her precious 60’s, she also bemoans that it was a time known for kids taking drugs, then, like the crazy mother bitch she is, she condemns the current generation for doing the same (242). And for whatever harebrained reason—no, reason, really—she thinks alcohol would be better for them. She proclaims them kids with minds of Jell-o™ (243).

Back to the military, she doesn’t mind the double-standard for women in combat (nor the double-standard in the selective service system, of course—something she never mentions) (244). I’m sure she would hold the same view about sports, if asked about the issue. Then she uses her magical femininity to shift the subject to the side, dragging in gays to the talk of the military. What do gays have to do with women in the military? Well, it does have something to do with lesbians in the military, lesbians who have been known to make up the majority of entire units in the military over the past however many wars (245).

Out of the blue (and into the black), Camille suggests that African American studies should concentrate more on actual Africans, on Africa itself. Why? Does she really think African Americans don’t have enough meaningful history worth studying? I would actually say African Americans have far more to offer than all of Africa (246). After this, again out of wherever, she acknowledges the jealousy that lady academics express toward one another, writing nasty things about one another. Women being women.

Quickly, she is an atheist who believes in all gods. Do you believe her? No? Neither do I (247). But I must admit her family’s relation to religion and church mirrors my own. The women go to church and carry around their Christian ideas, which the men freely ignore. She adds that nothing in her responded to the story of Jesus—interesting.

There is an area that Camille likes to go around on a regular basis. It involves her childhood love of masculine costumes. She thinks that somehow makes her masculine. Contrary to this notion, it is still feminine, this interest in the fashion of men. Even cross-dressing women still betray their femininity. Likewise, drag queens, even most of those who have undergone sex-changes, carry about their masculine traits; it’s a part of the appeal and the entertainment; it’s a game, really. Yes, there are sometimes gender-bending men who actually appear female, but even this is rare. And these persons still have masculine traits, whether hidden or not. The instance of this occurring with women who play the gender-bending game is almost non-existent (248).

Now she explains that when her family moved to a mostly-protestant area, she suddenly felt very Catholic. I thought Christianity didn’t touch her (249). Oh yeah, the pagan aspects did. Then she mentions Baby Doll, a movie she was not allowed to see as a youth, but she never makes the connection to Tennessee Williams, a playwright, and artist she never mentions (250).

Then, lo! She thinks Buddhism and Hinduism were absent in the 80’s (251). This is nonsense, they were all over America, in cults and groups and practiced by individuals. Yes, tell that to all the American Gurus and their followers. They didn’t go anywhere, dear lady. You did. Perhaps they weren’t as popular with college students—even this I doubt. She also has the habit of whining about comparative religious studies, but if you look into the history of this line of study, you’ll find they started in a select number of colleges and the universities in the 50’s and have continued to the present spreading to more schools over the years. They too never went anywhere (252). Next, what she says about Western atheism and comfort (which to her is like late Rome) is incorrect (253). Religion is alive and strong, at least in America. You obviously engage a very limited population. In fact, other than in Norway perhaps, atheism tends to be in the minority. And then continuing with her quest to find an absence of religion, she actually says that art is a substitute for religion. For whom, dear lady? I’d like to know more about this. Not for me. Not for anyone I know (254). Art as art, as a purely aesthetical pursuit, is a fairly recent development, and is maybe proof of the progress that Paglia sometimes admires and sometimes denies.

Aesthetics in their purest form as art and not art for the sake of practical, religious, political, or whatever other purpose—in other words art for the sake of aesthetics first is still a relatively emerging phenomenon. Again, it is no substitute for or opponent of religion. Show me the Greco-Roman piece that does not serve religious or political purposes. Show me the medieval work without the depiction of religious iconography or themes, or of leaders, aristocrats. Even the Enlightenment works usually find some alternative reason for their existence. Romanticism represented a break from those traditions, and from then on, the break finds more and more completion. It is not that all of the general elements of art were not there—most of them were, although there have been numerous improvements. It’s the reason for the art that has changed, and when you reach true aesthetics, you have something like what was once termed ‘art for art’s sake,’ really art for the sake of aesthetics, beauty, creativity, human expression.

She pays lip service to greatness in passing as she disparages some of the postmodern experiments, yet one is confident she couldn’t see what’s good if she were to see it (255). I am more than sure of it. Then, to add to her ignorance, she places all greatness in the past—except for certain architecture (no examples, of course) (256). She speaks a breeze, a pretender to the throne. Why do I have a room filled with books, manuscripts, many of them containing great art; although I am no collector, I access to every variation of art. Yes, great art, visual, literary, and a collection of music that exudes greatness, both classical and contemporary, including pop—Paglia, because of her distaste for and lack of knowledge of music cannot recognize greatness in contemporary or popular music. Somehow it eludes her that greatness is shown by comparing one thing to many others of its type. She is aesthetically ‘challenged.’ As if to illustrate this, she calls the story of Adam and Eve a great story, as if by it’s age it achieves something (257). This saga is a typical ancient tale, nothing special, unless you see it in the well-written work of a master.

Get this, Camille argues that Facebook and Twitter are replacements for mythology. A better comparison with mythology would be popular culture as a whole, with all of its villains and heroes, its beauties and personalities. You’d think she could make this connection considering she so often proclaims herself an admirer of pop culture, but no, she is too shortsighted, her mind a rambling, non-contemplative thing, it is the mind of a one attempting a task it does not recognize (258). And really, Camille, if pop culture is so vapid, why are you supporting it?

Again, Paglia says “no more great art.” Yes, we have addressed this, her weakness in the realm of aesthetics (259). She’s crying wolf, but the shepherd knows better. If only we couldn’t see Bloom’s insidious thought at work in her, if only a true aesthete had been her overseer. And really, if there is not enough great art in the public arena, have we not a true culprit to blame? The media, publishers, editors, critics, commentators, and even academics and the intelligentsia. How about gallery owners, historians, and on and on (260)? Yes, a point for not knowing the source of the problem. And another point for using so often a word, great, of which she knows so little (261).

On to American Indians, who were, by the way, victims of genocide. The end. Yet, despite all the odds, much of the culture of these peoples survives, although not in pristine form. But things and people change (262).

Another point for speaking of something of which she knows so little (263). Man-made global warming is a myth, a political myth, as proven by so many actual scientists. You can believe in it if you need to. Yes, some scientists and other politically motivated persons choose whether wittingly or not to misinterpret the data. Why can’t she mention this? Why does she so often show that she has neglected her home work. F, dear. You fail again.

Here we go with the Romanticism, the pantheism. Camille, as if from out of nowhere, as usual, proclaims that “human beings are nothing compared to the power of nature.” If she were to say ‘in terms of nature,’ I would agree; the earth itself has more staying power than the beings that inhabit it; but that is not what she says, and it is not what she means (264). For one, let us see nature write “The Wasteland.” Oh, you despise that poem, don’t you, Camille? And yet you mirror so many of its ideas when you’re not watching yourself.

Showing her tiny grasp over religion, she suggests that religion shows man’s frailty, man’s mortality, as well as tremendous archetypes. Here she does not observe that religion as well celebrates man’s importance, providence, and primacy (265). Religion is far more the celebration of man than of nature, unless, of course, your talking paganism, which balances the two a little more, perhaps. And then she gets into the myth of the victimhood of nature, which, of course, mirrors the myth of the victimhood of women that feminism espouses (266). Your pearl prize is the source of many of the day’s misgivings. The idea of female oppression follows closely the trail of Jewish oppression—an oppression which begs the question, what does is matter if you are hated as you thrive? Is that not, in fact, part of the reason you are hated? Well, women were neither oppressed or hated, so even the Jews have one on them.

Back to good ol’ mother earth, she says that it is hubris to think that nature is a patient on a table (perhaps, “a patient etherised upon a table?”). It is even more hubris to think of the cosmos, of nature, as limitless, and man as tiny or nothing (267). We are the most complex and interesting creatures that we know of, you hollow-worded woman. Once more, let’s see the oeuvre of Mars, of the moon . . .

Negro Spirituals. Camille just loves them, yet she has a silly womanly notion that the slave owners were oblivious to the multiple meanings of these negro spirituals (268). This simply shows a stupid contempt for white Southerners of bygone days. If these white slave owners were not aware of the black slaves’ sense of being oppressed and their desire to overcome it, the masters would not have been so severe in their threats and punishments; simply, if they thought the blacks were just fine with their pathological servitude, why worry at all? Let them roam free and have their way at day’s end, right? No! They knew fucking well that these slaves were not happy, that they desired their freedom at every moment, that they, indeed, hated their masters and would, if given the least chance, extract revenge and gain their freedom. Why the threats, punishments, and abuses? “If you even try to escape, you’re dead. And perhaps your family as well.” Get it? These are the words of a man who knows his subjects’ prayers. Maybe Paglia should study the Soviet military under Stalin to understand why he had so few deserters. This is just a case of an atheist, bourgeois professor patronizing the working class, blacks (and Indians, as we’ve seen), and religious people in general (269). Do you not think that MLK would be proud if his grandchildren were atheist, bourgeois professors?

As another example of her lack of understanding of race and religion, she implies that the Hollywood moguls, mostly Jews, were mostly from a working class background—a simple presumption. Let’s entertain your fantasy, lady. Not (270). She is probably one of those credulous folks who thinks that the descendants of the Rothschilds are actually entrepreneurs. I didn’t believe that such an idiot was possible until I encountered one. Continuing with film, with the movies, with Hollywood, Paglia declares (with the same haughty self-assuredness as usual), “It took a very long time for [movies] to be taken seriously.” How long is long, dear woman (271)? Movies were made in the teens, the twenties, then in the thirties assumed a gargantuan shape and size, outdoing all other artforms. Yes, Hitchcock may have complained in the thirties, but how long did he have to wait? Between 1937 and 1938, in a period slightly more than a year, Carey Grant, that fucking gem of Hollywood stars, an idol unlike any other, acted in three movies in a row that are still considered among the best of classic Hollywood films, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby and Holiday. Katherine Hepburn, one of Paglia’s favorites, co-starred with Grant in the last two. But because she is so single-mindedly and unexplainably concerned about religion, she skips over entire decades of memorable movies. Get it right, lady. Oh my! She even dismisses Birth of a Nation by saying simply that it is racist—how knee-jerky of you (272). Here she does something she criticizes others for, dismissing the past for its limitations, just as sophisticated atheists and secular humanists dismiss religion. What if I were to speak of the ‘racism’ of the ancients whose art you so adore, stupid wench? What about the slavery so prevalent in ancient times? Yeah, you get it, there is a double-standard for all cases. It’s not merely a matter of gender.

The fact that she puts so much emphasis on primeval archetypes (Jungian archetypes) puts her in the tradition of the literati of recent decades, her mentor Harold Bloom of primacy here, but also Joseph Campbell; these people dissect a work piecemeal, looking for mythical content, meanwhile overlooking aesthetic value—yet she does not see the irony when she criticizes the Theory people, who are just as clueless as herself (273). Yes, they dissipate themselves in such studies, seeking the devil in the details while missing the beauty of its lack all around.

And that closes the C-Span show. Next, Charlie Rose.

Paglia on Charlie Rose

After a segment in which several men argued about the bailout of Mexico, all in favor of the bailout to varying degrees (what a great setup for a debate), Camille speaks with Charlie Rose.

Sorry but repetition is Camille’s strong point. She again mentions that ‘regular people’ shout to her “Give ‘em hell, girl.” (274) Does anyone believe this? To top this, she claims to have more of a connection to working class people than any other intellectual (275). So we see the baseless claims right away.

What does she ejaculate next: Women are stronger than men (776). Yes, the strong man competitions are always dominated by women, and it’s usually the man who breaks down and cries in an argument. What is more, women, according to our dear lady, even oppress men. Yes, bitch. Maybe, one day, when you learn what integrity is, a day that will never arrive, you can speak of your superiority. I am superior to you in every meaningful way. But she believes her lies, at least at the time of their telling (277), the truth of the feminine.

Next is another staple, her quote about women and the grass huts. Let’s see her explanation this time; anything better? Oh, a new turn. Camille is here feeling haughty and all-powerful in her all too feminine way—that is to say, don’t take it too seriously. Now, this time men create all of the great monuments out of male anxiety™, the flight from women. This new take on why men create—or is it the old take? Dates! Anyway, now it is the all-powerful cunt that drives men to create great buildings and monuments (278). Where does this idea come from? Your experience with men, for sure—in other words, your fantasies. What is this crazy Chatty Cathy talking about? In earlier times women were used as cum rags and babymakers. Maybe they were allowed to cook, clean, and grow sprouts and berries. The power of the vagina doesn’t come into play here, sister. As an example of man’s lack of a need for woman out of the annuls of great men, can you imagine a woman, like a man, living in her study, with little or no human contact, studying science and the occult, thinking up theories, only taking a break to eat every day or two, like a certain seminal scientist? No, you can’t. Women can’t live like this, they cannot single-mindedly pursue study with such neglect of social affairs and human company. Women need men; men do not need women. And it would never even occur to a woman to pursue an ambition to the edge of sanity. Okay, maybe our fine scientist rubbed one off every fortnight or two, and maybe he even thought of a woman, done out of necessity, but what does this say about women?

Camille mentions the wonderful insight of standup comedians. What she forgets to mention is the lack of insight by women in general and female comedians in particular. Female comedians not only lack insight but the ability to make me laugh (279)? Joan Rivers may be an exception; isn’t there always at least one?

Again. She plays the part of the antagonist, arguing that her fellow feminists are stuck with twenty-five year-old ideologies; what she fails to mention, as always, are the man-hating laws instituted under those ideologies which are still in effect, laws that she never argues against (280).

Women rule procreation. Okay, Camille, then why the dick at all? Why ejaculation? More to the point, why the need for child support payments (281)? “The Mother Goddess.” Is she a match for Zeus or Odin? I mean, theoretically, a man can conceive hundreds of babies in the time it takes a woman to have one. So who is ridiculous? Camille knows so much about so little, perhaps a show of her superiority. Which sex do you think will prove itself superfluous first? Perhaps that’s when beastiality will come into play.

At this point we can acknowledge that Prof. Paglia is more mendacious than your average criminal. Although she doesn’t appear to be a psychopath, I feel safe here, around the halfway point, alienating half of my audience, and stating that women share many attributes in common with psychopaths. They lack depth of conscience, are not likely to be capable on a regular basis of meaningful empathy, sympathy, and insight into others. Of course, unlike the psychopath who must fake his way through life to hide his predilections, the woman has qualities that make up for this lack.

She is very sociable and capable of seeing an equality of esteem among those she meets, as well as appreciating humanity in its myriad forms. In fact, and oddly enough, one thing in particular one must appreciate is indeed a woman’s ability to appreciate. Women are muses, no doubt. Women also share a somewhat capricious love of joy, of company, and of social situations in general. Also, whereas men pursue art as an abstract activity, women can be appraised as artful in themselves; her ambiguities, her fakeries, her interest in being mysterious only matches her love of being attractive—the woman by her very nature is a true fraud. If properly understood, and made use of, this could actually lead to a penchant for art. And because of her scant interest in truth, in integrity, both of which seem not to appeal to most women, the woman is an actress, a pretender, the show is everything, appearances take precedence over substance. If the woman at times appears to lack interest in what is ultimately true or real in herself, it is because she has the same view towards other things. So, while I seem to be in some ways pointing out the weaknesses of women, I also admit their advantages, which in certain individuals can be extreme, a source of great power (which Camille tries to ascribe to women in general).

Women have a thirst for happiness, for joy and ebullience that is foreign to a man. This is one reason they never seem quite pleased; there is always more to be had. The painted face, not always aiming at beauty, sometimes achieves other forms of attractiveness. The woman wants others, not just men, to think things—about her. The faery world of the woman, a half-childish world of whim and playfulness, gives her a sheen, a natural appeal. Now why this is, all of it, Camille herself will unwittingly explain at a later time. A few more reflections though. Anyone who knows anything about women knows that they are just as capable of laughter, of being overjoyed, even delirious, as they are of crying, being (or playing) sullen, or resorting to hysterics—and even hysterics is a game, an attempt to elicit a reaction. The fight itself feeds a woman’s need for relation, no matter how artificial or shallow. The woman, the artist in the flesh, her body, her thoughts, her sensations, her flirtations, all are art (or artfulness, artifice). The woman of black—the ‘gothic’ type—attempts to charm through her exploration (and exploitation) of darkness, of the vampiric, she attracts by her oddity, her extravagance.

Women are also prone to capricious obsessions. It will make little sense to a man that a woman can expend so much energy on things with little or no substance, chasing what are rarely more than dreams. Indubitably in love with pleasure, women also find pleasure in sharing it with others. The state of ecstasy, and things that offer such, including the other’s ecstasy, are of primacy to women. When a woman is being pleased she wants to know that her pleaser is also enjoying the activity. More than anything though, the woman just wants attention, and to this end she’ll play the role: sadist, masochist, lover, flirt, innocent, authority, intellect—whatever it takes. And to end this brief trip around the feminine world, I’ll say that tears, yes tears validate a woman’s life, her sense of self; it’s almost a bacchanalian celebration when a woman cries.

One may wonder how women could be so different than men without anyone wanting to note these differences. It is puzzling why standup comedians and not psychologists are active in this realm. Why does no one dare to notice that women have a much shallower affect than men? Why not dare admit that a man’s reality is a more solid thing, while a woman’s is something that shifts along a continuum. Why is a woman so acquisitive compared to a man? Why is it so easy for her to trade one person for another, to freely mix the personalities of others as if they were merely a shifting singularity? And likewise could be said for her entire concept of her own life. Yes, the feminine mind is a collector; because she carries an aversion to seeing real depth, change is a constant, whether or not the actuality of change comes.

Enough for now. You may think I’m saying women are pure evil, and I am. And how wonderful it is. The great manipulators with their sleight of mind, their incredible strength in bending truth, that fiction. You may object to these analyses, but I am just trying to set up a profile, one that shows clearly that by judging her by a man’s standards, one is in fact misjudging Camille. Even a female academic, no matter how intelligent, must be appreciated for what she is, not for what she is not, for she is not a man. More on all of this later, when Camille tries to drag in brain science with a foolish interpretation of it. Now, for the few of you who are still with me, let’s continue with the interview, judging by a man’s standards her ingenuousness and lack of integrity. But we now see that this study shows that even a seemingly intelligent (and academic) woman lacks most of the qualities that are held in esteem by men. Top that with the fact that Paglia is not as intelligent, and certainly not as insightful, as she thinks she is, and we’re back on our way.

Now that we got that off our chest (we’ll save the Jews for later; one must always remember to offend the Jews), back to work. Camille comes in with a left cross on those ‘old feminists,’ telling us that she won the date rape war (no, not the sporting event). Yes just in case you didn’t know there was a stir over date rape, there was, and it was silly and very damaging to young men. I have but three words in rebuttal: Duke lacrosse team (282).

Camille next falls into a delirium of megalomania, claiming that she sees “her terms” everywhere (283). Considering she says nothing of originality, one wonders what terms these could be; perhaps, reformed feminism (one of her favorite false claims). It seems during this mid-90’s period, at the height of her fame, she suffered extreme bouts of egomania, narcissism, that is. But people let her get away with it. It is, after all, just so cute, her being a big girl and all.

Back to rape, she exclaims that rape is not a crime of violence but sex (another favorite of hers). Yes, rape is about sex and control, dear Camille. Unfortunately you underestimate the sadistic mind though, for violence, and causing the suffering of others can be very sexual for such a man. So you are not quite half-right (284). If you ask why I would know, I’ll simply say it is an act of extrapolation; I, for one, enjoy observing a woman in tears; call it sadism if you will; I’ll call it manhood.

Then we’re back on the gay men, “the gay male attitude.” She loves to celebrate an entire class of people that she invalidates (285). She must have thought a thought a time or two and realized that her theories of sexuality are bunkum. I mean, if a gay man is gay let’s say because his mother is overbearing, what have we to say of his pussy-loving brother? Did the overbearing mother make him want to eat and fuck pussy? Oh, nevermind, let us forget ourselves, for we are in the mind of a woman, which works on a sliding continuum (or so claim I); things in this world are not so consecutive or even connected; the desultory reigns.

Here again Paglia argues against date rape and sexual violation in general, urging women that you have consented to sex if you go to the man’s home on a first date. Yes, good point, Ms. P, unless of course the woman feels like phoning the police and having the man imprisoned lawfully but unjustly (286). Yes, ladies, keep your options open; Camille has taken no action to remove from the books the man-hating laws of feminism, for she is a mere shill. But our dear lady does not talk of such things—how convenient for all womankind. She continues by telling us that the weak girls say, “Slap him on the hand.” No, dear, they say, “Put him in jail “(287). And, if convicted of whatever phony charges, put him in prison. And, if exonerated, there are no apologies necessary, for we must protect the rights of the possible victim (and ignore the rights of the real victim, the falsely accused male). Of course, feminists would use the word ‘probable’ over ‘possible.’ And she won’t back up her date rape theories with the word, deserve—as in, she deserves to get fucked, or, he deserves to be jailed. Coward! She always has a way out—an emergency exit out of her own theories, this slippery woman (288). Uh oh, everybody run! She pulls out her ‘Ted Bundy’ card, in desperation—you know, the “He could be anybody, he could be a Ted Bundy.” (289) As if such a prolific serial killer is a common type. Then, as is often the case, she makes no sense by adding, “He could be a Jeffrey Dahmer.” Are you forgetting, Ms. P, that Dahmer was a total fag; yes, he was an exclusive gay man, that mythical figure that exists even though it shouldn’t (290). Yes, no need to fear him if you have a vagina a short trip away from your ass hole. And somehow this next part makes her none the wiser about what she just said.

Here she speaks of the mythical gay men again, declaring that they are “cruising in parks; they get beat up, they get killed.” A bit extreme, drama mama (291), a happy hyperbole. Just so you know for next time, some gay men stay home and watch DVD’s with their boyfriends—when they’re not busy fighting off cops in New York clubs with their fake tits, of course. Camille knows; it’s the old canard about the fourteen-inch anecdote. Yes, dear, I’ll have fun with you before I come in for the kill.

Camille does admit to lobbying for sexual harassment guidelines to be adopted by her university, while she pretends so often to be against such piddling claims of victimization. You see, fellas, she’s not really for you. She just likes your attention so she tries to say what she thinks you want to hear (292). Even that will change when we get to her cheeky flirtations over women being superior to men.

As a passing note, Paglia despises the New Historicists, who loosely base their theories on Foucault. Surprise, right?

Once again, one of her greatest weaknesses is her bad sense of aesthetics. She must look into the distant past to find great works, and most of the works she speaks of are not great anyway. While there are old quality texts and artworks, there are more recent works worth speaking of, many of them better than those she would espouse.

(I give Charlie Rose credit for actually trying to challenge Paglia’s thought, though he never catches on to her to her profound ingenuousness, nor her false claims or weak ideas.)

Madonna, yes. Camille loves Madonna for her sexual persona, funny enough, but not many others of the sexual personae of the 80’s. A shot in the dark: George Michael, Rick Springfield, Dave Gahan (whose musical career has been quite impressive), Morrissey, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Idol, Prince, Simon Le Bon, Michael Hutchence, Axl Rose, and even the hair metal boys. I would argue that there were far more male musicians who exuded sexuality than female in this period of pop music. I think some of it had to do with feminism’s horrible effect on fashion, shoulder pads, silly bangs, perms, silly accoutrements, and so on. To add to her Madonna mythology she claims every new woman pop star has been influenced by our blonde babe. While some obviously have been, I could name far more who were not influenced by our lady. I would name names, but I’m guessing you could think of a hundred or two. This is another of Palia’s grand claims that has holes throughout (293).

She claims to be a comedian, I guess because of her disturbing laugh, often coming at inappropriate times, and with an evil little wink to her feminine overseer (294). Then, and funny that she contradicts herself right away once more, she declares herself an outsider, believable enough, but then she and Rose begin talking about all of their elite insider ties, their friends, their parties. How could someone do this without noticing that she had? She lives on the sliding continuum (or so I say) where even truth shifts from one moment to the next. You see, she actually thought she was being honest when she called herself an outcast (295).

There is the Hillary meter to contend with; how does Camille feel about Hillary Clinton at any given time? Well, at this time she liked Bill but not Hillary.

Then back to myself—herself, that is. She’s a woman “with the soul of a gay man impersonating a woman,” an ingenuous academic no less. Does she suffer the awkward relationship with her parents? Is she an exclusive gay (296)? What were your parental issues, Camille? Did your father make you gay? And there’s the obvious reflection, if she were a gay man, she’d prefer sex with men, but she is in fact a lesbian who claims to be bisexual. Of course, she claims to have at one time had loveless sexual relations with a man or two. She was, as a side note, at the time of this interview 47 years old, and she is not at all attractive, unless you’re looking for someone to hate. In fact, she looks a bit old for her age, this in addition to her unsexual repulsive personality, and her horrid mind. How could such a sexless woman proclaim a love and obsession for sex? It’s an unappealing enigma. She gets along best, says she, with straight women and gay men, two categories that she does not validate (297).

Remember, Camille, we’re all bisexual; heterosexuality and homosexuality are psychological ailments, sexual anomalies. Paglia and her lover Maddex are bisexual women in a monogamous relationship. Let’s see, ten years together before they split, that means ten years with no cock, and you’re bisexual (298)? No, you’re not; you’re a dyke. After Maddex, with whom she shared custody of a child, she went into the arms of another younger woman. She is not bisexual. And she has declared that professors having relations with students harmed the students. Just wait to hear her most blazing lie about her relationships and sexuality; you won’t believe it. Yes, you avoided cock for how many years? Again, as Jason Lee’s character in Chasing Amy, Banky Edwards says, ‘Everybody needs deep dicking.’ Yet you went how many decades without it? Yeah, fess up, bitch. And lo! She would kill anyone with whom her lover would have an affair (299). That’s more violence, Camille. You know that’s against your religion—feminism. No, actually woman on woman and woman on man violence is not the crime that male violence is. Here again she mentions her ‘brawl’ with a student, and insinuates once more that she was involved in much more violence—from what we know so far, she committed violence against both men and women (300).

A logical faux pas again. Paglia grouped a Zen Master with Hindu monks and said they “play on the banks of the Ganges.” This would have been fine if she said Hindu monks did this, but since we have two subjects, she is making a stupid mistake. I would like proof that a Zen Master (high Japanese Buddhist teachers or gurus, in case you didn’t know) ever visited the Ganges (301).

Soon Camille makes the boast that she is having a great impact on young college students, yet there is no proof of such influence, especially in feminism, where it would count (one supposes) (302). Maybe she means she is having an impact on her own students. But sorry, that is not what she said.

Oh my! “Culture has gone down the tubes,” says she, then she immediately shifts to popular culture, and we must assume she meant that all along—no! Yes, popular culture is at a pretty low point, not that it ever had a high point. But culture as a whole is not in a state of decline, unless you consider, like a hippy of Camille’s sort, the 60’s to be a cultural pinnacle. Maybe the publishing houses (which publish your crap), the producers, the media masters, and the other mostly-Jewish (I got you) establishments are having a negative impact on culture by their power, but that does not exclude what people are actually doing in the current age (303). Just look what I’m doing, putting down a fraud who is poisoning our culture. Then she mentions a ‘cultural figure,’ Allen Ginsberg, who helped some find their own voice, says she. Well, I’ve heard this to be true of Bob Dylan, so no foul there. But then she mentions her influences, Annie Oakley, the sharpshooter, and Marshall McLuhan. Ugh! And the others . . .

She admits, however marble-mouthed, that she is a militant amazon feminist. One must appreciate the variance of her feminist angles. But this, by my standards, is the worst sort. It is anti-man, therefore anti-heterosexual, and therefore anti-family. No doubt, she, even though she makes a well-shined shill, agrees with all of the lopsided legislation that makes government writ of feminist ideology (304). She even identifies with Valerie Solanas, the psychotic bitch who wrote the SCUM manifesto, the Society for Cutting Up Men. Yes, a very man-friendly brand of feminism you foist, Camille (305). What an unconscionable cunt she is beneath the sales pitch. But Valerie was a true women’s activist, in the way the Hillside Stranglers were activists for the betterment of men.

Hun spiller som han tror, as says my assistant in this writing. Much as the woman is the actress, the pretender, the player, the object, the man is the thinker, the philosopher, the meditator, the subject. Camille wants you to believe, coming at you not as the thinker but as the show. She hopes you believe without reflection, she hopes she’s convincing on first impression. It is funny that when Camille is right, she proves herself wrong. She sees in woman the model, the actress, the starlet, the temptress, yet she wants to see herself outside of this depiction of the female. If we weigh the latter idea against reality, we find it lacking in verity; indeed we must see the former in her to understand her approach. Because she is the object she lacks objectivity, she lacks the reflective power of the man. The man, because he is the subject, sees the object and is therefore objective. This seems like a grand claim, much like hers, but if you reflect a bit on the conception, you’ll see where I’m going. To show you an example of Camille’s whimsical thought process, lacking in profound reflection, just witness her next grand claim.

Paglia now tries to use her favorite sport to describe an attitude toward and approach to the workplace for women. Says she, “If you want to make your way through the hostile workplace, you must study football, offense and defense.” The claim could be interesting, if she had thought, reflected before she spoke. You see, we understand that she does not mean that everybody must study football, but for some reason she cannot clearly express this. She indeed says precisely that you must study football. Why though? Because she is sliding along the continuum of female reality wherein every moment does not need to take into account either the prior or following thought or idea. In the moment, what she says is completely true to her, hence the confidence. The fact that even most football fans do not study football in this way, and indeed everyone who is not a football fan does not study football, is no concern to her because she is not seeing the larger picture in which more people are successful in business, in number, than those who study football. So, this disproves her theory altogether, a theory that can only live in the moment it is declared. The theory rings true at no other time. Thanks to the fact that most people are barely paying attention, much less reflecting on the truth or falsity of the claim, this allows her show to work (306).

Next she calls Brad Pitt’s magazine cover photo ‘retro.’ This is one of those ‘from out of nowhere’ kind of statements. It could be true, or it may not be. Who’s to judge, right? Me, perhaps? I have never seen a ‘retro’ Brad Pitt unless it was in a movie role. But we’ll let this slide; it will remain in contention.

Now, in a moment, a glowing moment of megalomania, Camille claims that it will take her but another twenty years to reform academe, as she likes to call it. Who could believe that this woman could reform academia? Is she going to do it single-handed? Well, we live in the future and know this to be false (307), unless the next few years prove us wrong. You’re running out of time, dear.

As a final note in this section, I’ll mention that her lover, Alison Maddex, was twenty years her junior. As I said (oh, my, I repeat), she had claimed elsewhere that professors who have relations with their students somehow retard the student’s growth, yet here she is with a woman young enough to be her daughter (308). And together they wind up ‘having a child.’ Don’t ask how the thing came about, but Maddex, of course, was the one who gave birth to the kid. Camille then adopted him. Later the two split and Camille went on to another younger lady.

Paglia on Later with Bob Costas 1992

This interview involves, perhaps, Camille’s greatest show of both megalomania and ingenuousness. I wonder what set such a mood, but I’m suspicious it comes of the fact that at the time her fame was something relatively new. It’s as if she felt she must come out swinging, with infinite, and unwarranted, self-confidence. Her masterwork had been published around two years prior and this may have been, at the time, her biggest chance at a mainstream audience for her ideas. Bob Costas, despite the fact that he came into fame through his pursuit of sports, was a figure of some gravitas at the time; he took a very serious approach to his interviews, giving, whether real or not, the appearance of an intellectual atmosphere on the show. I promise not to hold anything Costas said against our professor. Be forewarned though, this is the interview with the showstopper.

Out of the gates, Paglia says she’s bringing back the feminism of the 20’s and 30’s, a patently false claim. The comparison of her feminism to 20’s and 30’s feminism will have to wait until later, but the reason she makes such a proclamation is clearly sexual in nature, of course having to do with androgyny more than anything else (309). She usually says she represents the feminism of the 60’s, so this claim is an anomaly. Still speaking of feminism, she says it stresses independence, self-reliance, and taking responsibility, all three claims belied by the actual actions of these women and the legislation lobbied for by feminists over the past few decades (310). The idea that women are going to be self-reliant and responsible for their words and actions is just droll.

Now, this is the most bizarre of all her claims. I even had to go back in the video several times to make sure I heard her correctly. She says (around 2:40 into the show) that she is a career woman and she is married. What? Everybody do a double take. This had to be the period just before she ended up with Maddex. Is she lying about being married? I cannot find any record of her ever having been married. Nothing (311). The claim is even made more egregious by a statement she makes later in the interview. Whether she is lying to establish some sort of ethos for her audience is debatable; but surely she is lying, unless she is using the term marriage loosely to mean she is in a relationship with a woman; but this is never indicated, so the lie is the lie. Ethos is established, her statement confers on her a similarity to her intended audience. The show is on.

Camille soon says of herself, she speaks for the neglected women out there. Okay, the neglected woman must be a feminist lesbian or bisexual, right? No. These positions are well-represented, if not in the popular eye, in the world of feminism (312). She doesn’t even speak for lesbians because, despite the facts of her life, she claims to be a bisexual. Who does she speak for, I mean, other than herself? She does make quite a stir to distract us from the destructive nature of feminism, an ideology that has been quite destructive to marriages and families and to men.

Now, let it be known, she is a 60’s libertarian.

She’s pro-homosexuality, yet delegitimizes it completely as a pathology (313).

Get this, she declares like a polite little conservative, “Traditional values are the backbone of this country.” Then why, may I ask, is your prized political project, feminism, doing all in its power to subvert ‘traditional values’ (314)? The ingenuousness of the earlier Camille seems almost a sick joke performed to poor salt in the wounds of the victims of her prized feminism. The gall of this dyke is beyond the pale. Run for your life when your slaver speaks of freedom, when your butcher preaches veganism.

She has a pet theory about men and genius. To counterbalance the fact that men are generally responsible for the greatest achievements, she needs to pathologize men as a whole. “I think that genius and criminality are both extremes and deviations at the ends of the human spectrum.” Yes, extremes possessed of men certainly. This would leave the woman in the middle zone, in the realm of mediocrity, if you will, but Camille would never go as far as to express the implications of her theory. Once again, it’s the immediacy of female thought. The thought is but a superficial declamation without its context, devoid of the depth of consequence, unrelated to its counterparts (315). Yes, she is trying to explain away woman’s lack of greatness without acknowledging her mediocrity—and certainly Camille is exempt from this rule, for she is not only great but supremely so. She really believes that she has overcome female limitations, yet she displays them at every turn. She is after all even more ‘under the thumb’ of her own femininity than most. Because she denies it, she is its slave. Yes, I can pathologize as well. Her shadow is a banshee. Only, I can see the forest and the trees, unlike her. She sees only wood to burn, what is hers to have. And she’s too busy looking to see.

The fact that the profoundly intelligent mind is at a good distance from and unrelated to the psychopathy of the profoundly criminal mind is not within her scope of understanding, despite her later false claim that women are good psychologists. And she greatly underrates the capacity for the female mind to be pathological. Oh, look at all of those friendly women and obsessive men. Okay, whatever you say, chatterbox. Like a clitoris masquerading as a penis, she’s fast and shallow. How is it, for instance, that so many old ladies justify to themselves their unnecessary shoplifting habit? Trick question; they’re women and therefore need no justification for anything; justification comes from justice, which is almost completely alien to the woman. So what does that say about female lawyers, or attorneys? A lot. Face it, females are more prone to crime than they are to greatness; you see, I just disproved her theory another way.

By the way, once again, the sequel to this essay, a review of Paglia’s writings, will show that her books are even more guilty of her brand of mendacity than her public appearances.

Oh, yes, more talk of greatness. “Great art comes from obsessiveness, comes from a kind of self-mutilation of relationship,” and so on (316). What? What is self-mutilation of relationship? If it’s self-mutilation, it is not mutilation of relationship. She’s dragging in an extra element. And, by the way, if self-mutilation leads to greatness, women should be great at everything, for it is women who most often mutilate themselves. She uses this same half-baked explanation to explain away the lack of female chess-masters, hackers, and so on (317). And then she makes her claim that women are good at anything psychological; no women are good at anything psychotic (318). More claims: “Women are good at music”—except for composition, affirms Paglia. Why? “Because composition seems to be very abstract, cold, almost mathematical.” (319) Here she unwittingly admits women are not good at abstraction (complex thought) and mathematics (which old timers have always known). “Women don’t like an inhuman world,” says she. Again, an admission that women are not good with symbols: writing, mathematics, profound thought, anything complex, the working out of conclusions. Argument is especially difficult for women, perhaps why they can never reach a conclusion to their disagreements and gripes—unless the opponent quits or submits from exhaustion. Then she brings forth another, slightly different, explanation of her ‘women and huts’ quote. Why bother explaining? Her excuses are poor; we know this (320). Another stupid, or vapid, declamation: “Every move forward means that you’ve lost something.” Yes, and perhaps that ‘something lost’ was unessential. Romantic bullshit! Something must be replaced in the name of progress, and things are lost in the mix. Either you turn into a Luddite or look for the best possible future (321). Then, a fucking gem ejaculates itself from her cunt-licking mouth: “The male brain is more limited than the female brain.” Not only is this a meaningless generalization, it is completely wrong; the opposite is true: the female brain cannot stop its constant chatter and imaginings and therefore cannot find the space for reflection, a masculine quality (322). After admitting umpteen limitations of the female mind, she tries to avert your attention by saying the opposite. She doesn’t even realize she admitted to these female limitations—stupid irony. If all the male brains are so limited, why does greatness tend (almost entirely) to come of the male mind? Oh, it continues: “The female brain is vaster and more multi-tracked.” Yes, it is more multi-tracked, if by that you mean constantly moving along the track without a pause to account for what has occurred, such is true. But, vaster? No! The male mind is a fucking universe, an endless empire, whereas the female mind is one-tracked and limited to the matter at hand, in addition to being clouded with feelings and all of the feely things (323). Balderdash on the brain, dear Camille? What obnoxious fallacies. And, God forgive her little brain, she thinks she’s like a man (324). You think like a woman in drag, Professor Paglia.

Back to Madonna. Camille swears that Madonna is trying to get feminism back on track. Let’s ask Madonna about that. You could imagine the surprised response (325). Not too far from such a claim is her next. She actually believes her childhood acts of dress-up were ‘transsexual gestures.’ I think I’ve already explained that her attempts at being masculine are very feminine (326). Oh no. “Current feminism is in a Stalinist phase.” A repeat. Why the hyperbole? And what have you done to redress the mistakes of your ‘opposition?’ Nothing! (327)

Okay, here comes the ultimate lie. She claims that she has never lived with a man. Yet earlier in the same interview she claimed to be married. I listened to her say it ten times because I couldn’t believe my ears. Let’s work our way through the layers of ingenuousness. Calvin Klein, who is thought to be gay, is married to a woman he does not lie with. This is called a noncohabitating relationship. So, either she’s telling the whole truth in both cases, i.e she’s married and she has never lived with a man—she has a noncohabitating relationship; or she’s lying either once or more, i.e. either she is married and lives with her husband, she is not married and has lived with a man, or she is not married and has never lived with a man. The last is the most likely, for she is an exclusive lesbian after she gets together with Maddex. So, I think we figure out that she has only lied once in this combination, but this is just too much bullshit (328). Then she comments that she fights with men constantly. Doesn’t this contradict her declaration of being the friend of men, and of being, basically, obsessed with gay men? (329) To top this, she proclaims triumphantly that she does not need the approval of men. Oh yeah? You think the approval of women (which there are few signs of) is going to get you far? In the manufactured world of feminists, perhaps. But not in the larger world (330). Many of her fans are credulous men; it is really quite pathetic. Male feminists (not that all of her male fans are feminists)—male feminists are disgusting ignoramuses; what a bunch of pussy-whipped halfwits. It makes no sense; they do not know.

This arduous task continues. Paglia now talks about sexual harassment and the obscenely unrealistic definitions of rape. Yet she does nothing to change the standards (which are even worse in the UK and a few European nations, some in which condomless sex is considered rape). Silence (331). No one believes charges of rape, she says. Then how about the Duke lacrosse team? And let’s not forget the persecution of Michael Jackson in the press. Rape calls for Camille’s patented Ted Bundy commentary, you know, the bogey man thing. How desperate (332). Soon her speech turns repetitive and boring—she’s losing her touch, losing her audience. Then she explodes with, “The price of freedom is risking rape.” Yes, that and submitting your freedoms for the sake of freedom à la GWB. Where is all of this rape taking place? As an example of how civilized countries overcame the common occurrence of rape, Norway has not had a rape committed by a native in over five years, although Muslim immigrants have committed a few. Rape is such an anomaly that it requires little theorizing (333). Wasn’t Mike Tyson convicted of rape only around a year before this interview? Then she takes her hyperbole a step further, with her usual comment on the sexual bravery of gay men, as if Jeffrey Dahmer and his likes lives around the corner of every gay bar: “Gay men have known for centuries that the price of sex can be death.” Again! She gets two points for this one, one for blatantly exaggerating and one for calling on her invalid compatriots (333; 334).

And a point for Costas. Every time he questions her absurd claims, Paglia backs down and changes her entire tune (335). A step to the side now, date rape. I’ll throw in my piece here. If I go on a date with a woman who is not my sister, I expect sex. No sex, I’m never bothering with you again—you may well no longer exist. If I did the same to you, how would you feel about it? Yes, the woman too wants sex.

Camille repeats for the umpteenth time that she loves gay men and drag queens. No comment (336).

At least at some point in the conversation Camille admits her conceit. But she never admits to her lies, false boasts, absurd claims, and flagrant contradictions—in toto her ingenuousness. Then, as if to prove my point, she says in quick succession that she couldn’t get published (true) and she couldn’t get a job (false). Why such combinations, such pairings of truth and falsity? She just can’t help it (337). She’s ‘talking from the hip.’

She is obviously jealous of women who have careers as profs in the Ivy League, claiming that they got there by kissing men’s asses (338). It would take a miracle to make this idea universally true. Funny though that by saying this Camille is admitting that women are not qualified for such positions; you see, in her mind women cannot be legitimately qualified for Ivy League jobs. This is telling about Paglia, another of her unwitting admissions. You see, she is either right that women are not qualified to be professors in these prized positions, or Paglia is just a misogynist, incapable of seeing real, valid qualification in women. I know I have met very well-educated female professors with an especial talent for teaching students. Understand though that these admissions always slip between her lips unwittingly; even she knows that women are generally not up to the tasks, the work of men.

Another collection of the bad aspects of women: their inability to think, their emotionalism (a myth that confuses feeling with emotion), their lack of clarity, and their basic unfairness. How did all of that come out of her mouth? And I do not agree: women can certainly think, they are not overly emotional, although they are often overwhelmed by the constant string of feeling that comes over them, they can certainly have clarity, and many of them tend toward egalitarianism, which is beyond fair. You see, my ideas about women, though they may seem misogynistic at first, are much more realistic and fair to the reality of the feminine mind. Oh, her fights with other feminists (339). She then decides that feminism should be bipartisan, when she knows most conservatives do not support a good portion of the feminist agenda (340). You mean feminism is an ideology, replete with dogma? No. . . Yes. Next she claims that there is no backlash against feminism (341). Yes, unless you are a self-respecting man. She actually plays the feminist shill second to none, saying, the country is quite conservative. Yes, but the laws passed in favor of feminism are outright fascist (342). Speaking of the most heinous of feminists, she says celebrity seems to have stopped their development—in contradistinction to her fame., which shows an insight that can only come of a bathroom and a mirror. And their development into what? Nazi feminist warriors intent on castrating every man in sight (343)?

Then Bob Costas shows his stereotyping colors with his example of stupid and irresponsible behavior in a ‘bad neighborhood,’ which according to his insinuations must be a ‘black neighborhood.’

Camille thinks she is literally some sort of hermaphrodite. Well, show us your dick then. No, Camille is a woman through and through. She also thinks her detachment from ordinary human relationships—as if she practices such—makes her a better scholar (344). As if her relationships could really hurt her ‘scholarship.’ She then goes all out megalomaniac, declaring herself unrivalled as the leading female intellectual in the U.S. (345). What kind of claim is this? I know of several female intellectuals who dwarf what you have to offer.

Next, Camille proclaims that the generation of the 60’s hasn’t made its case (346). How many lifetimes do you require? You’ve made your point over and over again, force-fed it to all you could. Now she identifies with her generation of feminists and their ‘successes,’ the opportunities they’ve created for women and whatever else—this after continually distancing herself from these same feminists (347). Oh! And she speaks, loud and declarative: “There should be no obstructions to women’s legal and political advance.” Yes, but there should be every possible impedance to male legal and political advance, right? Is the truth coming out and by doing so making her even more of a liar? I do not appreciate the paradox here (348).

Now another ejaculation leaves her lips: “A lot of the turbulence [are you kidding? Turbulence?] between the sexes is not coming from the social realm.” All of it is coming from the social realm; how does she see so fit to turn reality on its head (349)? “And it’s not therefore remediable by passing more rules and regulations.” You are right, but for the wrong reasons. It is remediable by eliminating laws (350). Laws built on the feminist double-standard must be repealed. Otherwise, no chance for any redemption, bitch. What is the solution to the ‘turbulence between the sexes?’ Says she, we should look into ourselves psychologically, spiritually, and use literature. What does literature have to do with a gender war engendered by feminism (351)? Nothing. Literature does not heal psychological problems, does not cure cancer, and does not end gender wars. And to add to this, says Paglia that men created the social realm and have therefore been dominant in it (352). Both statements are false: men did not create the social realm (without the compliance of women), and they do not dominate it; women have always been important in ‘the social realm.’ They did not play the same historical role as men for the most part, but they did play a role, perhaps a legitimately feminine role. Then, in contradistinction to this claim, she says that women have always controlled the emotional or sexual realm (353). Why the or? She is suggesting that the emotional realm is the same as the sexual realm. This is absurd (354). And, no, women do not even control their own ‘emotional realm.’ And the sexual realm, well, your control, if it exists at all, was a product of your feminism, and artificial, and unreal, control. What Camille is trying to suggest is that women control when a man gets laid. This is just silly, for a man does not even need a woman; indeed the woman is the needy one. And if we are speaking of actual sex and not the protocol of the cock-tease, who is really in control in the bedroom? But one must forgive her, for Camille knows nothing of cock, even though she’s ‘married.’ And to add to her egregious ingenuousness she never admits that the notion of male oppression and female ‘victimage’ is the basis for an entire class of hypocritical laws (355).

Playing her part, trying to garner support for feminism among men, Camille goes on to explain her adoration of male sports figures and rockers (356). Good try to play the bisexual. Even worse, she says, “People who like rock like me because my voice is the voice of rock.” Megalomania that is best saved for professional wrestling (357). She even adds an incredibly stupid comment, claiming that she is the first lead guitarist who uses words. Don’t you mean you’re a vocalist who speaks sans notes? Uh, this tangent is just too much (358).

That was the most obnoxious video—no, it gets worse. Anyway, she started a megalomaniac and ended the same.

Paglia in a phony debate at Yale, called, Resolved: Women Are Better Than Men.

Here we are at the Yale Political Union. And Paglia was their guest speaker; the other speakers were students. This is the most ridiculous title of them all, almost as annoying as her general presence and her chatter.

I’ll say this. It’s as if no one has ever really questioned the validity of her statements, especially her bold and untrue claims that have no evidence for and therefore little evidence against. Well, if one actually uses ones mind, which should likely be the outgrowth of experience and insight into that experience, one has the evidence or its lack clearly at hand.

As an introduction, the host calls her “academia’s one woman army.” Okay, ready to lose the war?

She begins with the names of the supposed ‘reformers’ in the ‘Reform Movement in Feminism’: Christina Hoff Sommers (an ‘equality feminist philosopher’), Wendy Kaminer (lawyer and writer), and Katie Roiphe (author and journalist), the last being “the first intellectual to arise from her generation.” (359) There is no reformed feminism, only feminism. If there were reformers, there would be reforms, in the laws, in the way men are viewed, in the feminists’ approach to truth and reality. There are not.

Here we go. Camille criticizes the political correctness of Yale and suggests that the administrators and staff at Yale don’t like her. Then why did they publish your book, Sexual personae? Why did you get your Ph.D. from Yale? Talk about empty rhetoric (360).

The feminism of the 21^st century will be a better, “much more humane” feminism, offers Camille. Is she speaking of the fascist activities of the corporate-government coalition? No? Where is this feminism? In the land of make-believe where it will stay (361). No law has changed; at every legal turn is a double-standard, that these ladies of course love, despite their fight for a ‘fair feminism.’

Say Camille, “suddenly she launched [herself] on the scene.” A favorite. Yes, and at such a young age (362). And after over a decade of trying to get her book published.

She affirms the resolution “Women are better than men.” A laughable statement if there were one (362). Thus spake the Professor.

Okay, here we go: Camille’s three categories that are the basis of her argument: 1. biology; 2. history; 3. art.

Before she even begins to explain, one can clearly see she chose areas in which men are superior (363).

1. Biologically and physically, men are superior to women in every way (sports, strength, fighting, war, brain-functioning) except giving birth. Let us remember that a man can conceive several children in the time it takes a woman to incubate one. Despite this, obnoxious females like to suggest that men will eventually be (or already are) superfluous in the breeding process, yet with a little technology we could say the same of women.

2. With few exceptions men have been the makers and movers of history. Greatness throughout history has been a male achievement. Almost all developments by which we can say there is a history have been brought about by men.

3. Art is a man’s world if there were one. All good and great art is the product of men save a handful of exceptional cases of female achievement.

Okay, the woman may be the “mistress of birth,” as Camille claims, but she is certainly not the “origin of all things.” This is such a foolish claim she should be embarrassed at its passing through her lips, but fortunate for her career as a hoax, she has no shame (364). Additionally, man’s contribution to procreation, swears she, is “nothing but a pin prick”—more like a prick gushing with cum. But, no, sorry lady, next time I’ll cum on your self-satisfied pate. Why the prick? Oh, because she knows that manipulative women poke holes in condoms. Sorry, bitch, you’re taking the pill. To add fuel to the little flame she lights, she commands that “Man could drop dead of a heart attack immediately after conception.” Of course he could suffocate her as well—a pure and personal abortion, righteous birth control. “He is utterly useless to the process of reproduction after that point.” This coming from a woman who has no relations with men, who has never given birth, who hasn’t bedded with a man for probably twenty years at this point (365). Did I forget that she became a deadbeat mom? And this is the pride of biology, to be a baby-making machine (366). It doesn’t occur to her that fathers play a role in a child’s life, no. I guess the father’s place, in feminist terms, is merely paying the bills. Equality ends fleet when it comes to the man’s rights. Ain’t that right, princess? And to add another layer of filth, “Woman has used him, sucked him dry, and cast him aside.” What? If you sucked him dry, there would be no conception (367). And “casts him aside?” Really, the feminist utopia, amazon rapists. If “all that she wants is another baby,” as Ace of Base says, then there you go, enjoy your imagined superiority, cum dumpster. And throughout all this she can’t keep a straight face. She grins, thinking herself cute, by so doing coming off pathetic, as her feminazi audience enjoys her prideful banter, the feminist comedy routine. And this is the talk of the man-loving feminist? She’s lost her character. Back to man-bashing at its most senile (368).

Then a false claim: Woman is the center of all ancient legend. Au contraire, dear Camille; you know you are fibbing. It was enough to say that woman is the mistress of birth (369). Again, “All worship began in the fertility of mother earth.” Wrong, that doesn’t occur until mankind starts to settle down (370). The worship of the hunt comes much sooner than the worship of mother earth. Then she swears, in Hinduism woman is in control of the cycle of birth and death, i.e. resurrection and the cycle of lives. Perhaps a goddess is responsible for this, but not a woman (371). And in Hindu society women’s rights don’t go very far at all. This leads to the mythology of the woman as the womb and tomb from which man emerges—the great baby-maker, again, the legend of the cum dumpster (372). Next she says, ‘an objective person’ can see that a man’s life is a staggering from a control by the mother to a control by his wife. What? Again, wrong. I was never controlled by my mother or any other woman. And what if I controlled my mother in addition to other women? What of that? Does that make me some sort of anomaly? No (373). And then to top it all: “Woman is the Master Paradigm of all creation.” Of course she knows that men are far more creative than women. She needs to rely on symbolism to give the woman the upper hand. In reality women are the master paradigm for irrationality and self-centeredness (374). Woman is a giver of birth, but that is not all creation. Okay now, listen Camille. Women’s connection with nature is one of the primary themes of mythology because the woman is materialistic, and therefore earthy, in this world and of this world. Yes, women are this-worldly, not abstract, not far-thinking, in fact, not so ‘thinking’ at all. I guess one can match her fictions of misandry with the facts of misogyny, even though she has already shown herself to be the true misogynist.

We realize here, for the sake of her argument, Camille has gone from seeing women as victims to seeing women as the better sex. So she’ll overcome the norms of feminism by turning reality on its head, vagina-up, so to speak. No chance, lady (375). And soon she’ll get into brain science with more wild claims, but I’ll refute her half-baked declarations with the reality that bears out experience. Notice that she boasts of the woman’s place as a mother, yet says she herself has no interest in it, claiming “she has no maternal instinct whatsoever.” (376) So, if women are superior because they can have babies, and you are incapable of having a baby, does that make you less of a woman? Indeed it does, by your false logic.

Now to the brain science. She brings up the fact that women are capable of using both spheres of the brain at once, only she leaves out the ‘at once’ part. Why? Nevertheless, what she doesn’t mention is that women are incapable of using one sphere at a time and are therefore in a far shallower world, an almost strictly physical world of feelings and sensations (377). Okay, this is where I chime in with my version of the gender differences (which are of course confirmed in the brain research, as reality would be). I would argue that women’s thinking is always muddled with feeling. So we see that this functioning of both sides of the brain at once is not always an advantage. Now, you may think I’m making bold statements, but, unlike Camille, who has never spent a significant amount of time around a man, I have spent a lifetime amongst women. Let us remember that she has claimed to be married right before she admitted that she’d never lived with a man.

I may be repeating myself here, but I think it is appropriate, considering Camille is trying to raise the female mind to a height not proper too it. Yes, women have a tremendous ability to appreciate, and this ability can be stretched almost illimitably. So, again, we must appreciate a woman’s ability to appreciate. But man, man is capable of mental feats most foreign to a woman. He is a ruminator. He turns over and over in his mind (in his brain, if we want to speak physically or biologically), and as a result he is a creature of insight, of compassion, of sympathy, and understanding. His thinking runs deep. Of course, there are stupid or dull men whose faculties must be regarded as anomalies. But because of man’s complex thought he is capable of phenomenal abstraction and creation, especially when compared to a woman. Man is the discoverer, the seer, the contemplator. But woman is the artful creature of ambiguities, mysterious in her playfulness and her deceptions. Woman is the greatest liar, manipulator, but also the commiserator, in the sense that she can see the worth in people without judging too critically. In fact it is not in her nature to be critical in any profound way. She may cavil and lash out from her peevishness. But women unlike men are not overconcerned with truth or justness; they are not held back by a need for continuity. The woman is an actress; she’ll dress herself up (like Camille did as a youngster), make herself look exactly as she wishes. Such an ability is deceptive. She can even pretend to be what she is not without any great pang of conscience; this is not to say that women are actually evil and devoid of conscience, just that they are less inhibited by its requisitions.

Substance is at odds with appearances as man to woman. Happiness and ebullient feeling mean so very much to the female mind. The painted face, the mental mask, the devilish ability to lead others like a Siren, these are characteristic of the feminine mind. The woman really aims to be mysterious to attract more attention, for attention is key, regardless of whence it comes. We all know that women throughout history are not made to face a proper right of passage. I mean, perhaps the losing of her virginity is something like a right of passage, but it is a simple moment, with its consequences, but nothing like the life-shaping difficulties that boys and men must face in the face of their social being’s survival, success or failure. A man can be a bona fide loser, speaking socially, in contradistinction to his chance at being a winner. Women, although they have a pecking order in their society cannot be total losers, beta-beings, damned to an inferior existence. While men often face life or death, win or lose, situations, women can play, childlike, even when considered in whatever way inferior or less than other women. Our feminist-cursed society emphasizes feminine self-esteem far to much and to an unrealistic degree. It is men who suffer so the pains of esteem in its lack. We know that women are also prone to extreme and sudden changes of mood. The are just as likely to laugh, cavort, and become overjoyed, and, yes, delirious, as to cry, play (or be) sullen, or make use of hysterics. And despite appearances it is usually a game for women. Even suicide attempts tend to be ingenuine acts, just an expression of passing pain, the constant pull of feeling—again, for women feeling is constant and may even be overwhelming. It doesn’t even occur to the overwhelmed woman that her feelings are a mystery to man only because they are a mystery to herself; she is incapable of translating these overpowering feelings into words. I know mysteries, and I know that some mysteries are not covering any meaning beneath—some things are just mysterious in themselves.

Unlike the man, who is a creator and artist in act, women are artists in their very person; look at Camille’s playful act in every public appearance; she’ll convince you not through logic or plausibility but through her own personality, her act. Again, her body, sensations, and thoughts tend toward flirtation and artfulness or artifice. While men are serious, solemn, and even somber, women tend to be capricious, whimsical, superficial. Never mess with a woman’s heart because she’s playing with yours. Women lack a sense of hierarchy in the sense that they don’t rank priorities in the way of men; they’ll expend themselves on whatever catches their fancy. Pleasure, pleasure, and more pleasure—the woman’s goal. Meanwhile the man bides his time and reserves his efforts for what he deems important. To be fair though, the woman also enjoys the pleasure of others; it’s as if happiness and pleasure is a community or at least a collective or dual experience for the female. And women love to see happiness in others; in fact, they often don’t understand why a man is unhappy or discontented; maybe the circumstances are just too complex for her to understand; this is not a knowledge she wishes to share. Also, women are capable of going to great lengths to please others; it gives them a more cheerful and rewarding sense of reality. Finally, and once again, tears are the lifeblood of a woman’s life. Her sense of her place in the world and the meaning of life depends on the ability to cry. Crying is not always an expression of sadness, for men and women, but for the woman crying can be a masochistic celebration of life itself. But don’t let that make you think she won’t turn just as easily against you and play the part of the sadist. Meanwhile, as Camille would say, men build, create. Well, they also structure, judge, divide, evaluate. And on into the outskirts of Heaven and Hell.

Back to the charade, Camille ejaculates (she wishes), “Men can either think or feel.” Yes, and? Don’t you love that she tries to put her own poor interpretations into the gears of reality? Instead, one can say, ‘men can think and then feel.’ Then think, then feel, then think, and so on. It is important here to understand that the way that women feel is not the same thing as the way a man experiences emotion. A woman’s emotions are not profound, and this can be seen as one of their advantages. They are not bogged down by their feelings, just affected enough to express a something. You see, because it is in his nature to reflect almost constantly, a man gains insight into his emotions (and even his sensations) through thought. Women, because they get no break from their feelings, very rarely make anything of them; they instead react as if something is happening to them. In fact, because a woman lacks insight into these things, she cannot even emulate or simulate the emotions of man. Camille is already drowning; she is far over her head (378). And now our lady of the immolation of mankind swears, men have “tunnel vision” which has led to “those extreme achievements of culture.” How often must she make excuses for the mediocrity of women? Now weigh this against my offering, and you will understand how lost in her female-only world she is (379). How do men have tunnel vision? Men are creatures of reflection and contemplation; women are the ones who can only see what is directly at hand—on their sliding continuum of reality and ‘truth.’ If one is capable of profound or complex thought, of indeed separating thought from emotion and ‘feelings,’ how can he be trapped in tunnel vision? Of course, because of her audience’s feminist bent, she is handing out water in the desert; they’ll believe anything that leaves her unstained lips or her inviolate vag.

And men ‘destroy the feeling of social occasions’ with their, obscene things that they are, intellects. They just don’t understand that truth and meaning don’t matter; it is all a show and a play (380). This is a social occasion, a time to be stupid and insipid; the call here is one for vacuity and sensibility over sense, an inside joke told by Jane Austin. But women, bizarre and special creatures that they are, know better than men. Silly men inject thought and reflection where is doesn’t belong, at a dinner party. Just have another drink. Is there any question then why men do not require such superficial meetings of the mindless? Why men care so little for events that call for decorum, that most feminine of traits? Yet, men have etiquette, men have charm, men have charisma, and these things do not even require long training. Whereas a woman must be civilized by the teachings of her mother, of her social circle, of her teachers and her idols, man becomes civilized through trial, through the dreaded right of passage, that, despite what some may think, is not a single event. Reflection and evaluation as well result in the favorable masculine traits. The damned male brain, so full of things unseemly. Meanwhile the woman learns to act according to custom, or as custom requires, through silly training. And in this day and age many women are in fact lacking in the training that results in a civilized person. The beast of beauty! Beware!

This thing with the ‘objective observer.’ This woman has zero objectivity. “Obvious to the objective viewer all along . . .” Viewer? That is not quite right, Camille; this only further proves how little you know of objectivity. Objectivity tends to ‘observe,’ not ‘view.’ Observing involves an active component. Anyway, “Woman’s brain is global,” by which she just means both sides of the brain are constantly firing at once without letup. But she can’t see the downside to this. I’ve already explained (381). Shallowness, my mistress of birth—oh yeah, that, you lack maternal instinct, so I guess you’re a eunuch. Your female mind is not only shallow, it is limited to ‘feeling things’ both in thought and sensation. You lack the clarity of man. At all times feeling interferes with your thought. Imagine, my dear fellow men, if at all times your thought were interrupted by the functioning of your digestive system, yes if digestion were a constant conscious object, taking up your energy and interrupting to lucid functioning of the mind. Bowels, pains, petty aches . . . What kind of thinking would result? Imagine the productions of such a mind. A feeling one, certainly. A thought informed by ones physical feeling at all times! Is it any wonder that in actual mythology women are closely connected with the earth, indeed earthiness, worldliness, sight, sound, taste, touch (the tactile). This is why she is the lesser sex. She is incapable of the true complexities of abstraction in any deep way, of deliberation, forethought, deep emotion, and compassion, all manly traits. Of course she can come back at you with manipulation and deceit, with all the gall in the world. Now aren’t you glad that your brain functions the way it does? Can you imagine the amount of compensating that goes on in the female intellect? Would you rather be a creature incapable of profound emotional and intellectual connection and exchange, of difficult formulations, of creative mental interplay, of insight, of integrity, and of, again, compassion? The very compassion that lets us ‘feel’ for the limitations of our lesser sex. Dare I say ‘our?’ Yes. For they are ours. Without us they are lost in a world of self, a position in which they cannot survive. For the woman, the entire world is an inextricable series of connections all of the self.

Let’s speak for a moment of female values. Have you ever wondered why a woman can treat two completely different specimen of person the same, indeed with the same consideration and esteem? Because she is incapable of seeing the nuance of meaningful difference. Compared to a man, anyway, she is not so capable of sound discrimination. Yet we do not treat her as a complete lesser because we are men and capable of supreme compassion. Yet, some would like to impose such feminine values on society as a whole. This is doubtless both untenable and undesirable. It is certainly a cliché by now that feminine hunger for equality is not reconcilable with the individual’s hunger for freedom. The founding fathers of America blundered in their androgynous aims.

Camille won’t quit with this generic brain functioning discovery. You should know that the scientist I know of who made this discovery—there may be others—has no insight into what she found. It’s just charts based on readings of a working set of brains. But Paglia makes her own nonsense of the discoveries, offering, “The woman thinks on many tracks at once. The woman takes the whole of existence into herself.” This sounds so grandiose because it is just that (382). The woman takes what surrounds her into herself. How many ‘tracks’ is she on? One, the continuum that leads into the future but that does not hold to its own rules and promises. She takes into the future only what she needs, running over hearts and keeping the little baubles and bibelots of past relationships and acquaintanceships, of those come and gone. The woman once she has you has you forever in her phony skin-deep way—for she never really cared to know you as an individual. Only the most dedicated wives, women beyond the pale to female standards, above and oh so far out of sight of the normal feminine eye, defy these tendencies. If you ever discover such a woman, consider yourself the blessed of anomaly. The children of Mnemosyne are to be cherished as the highest the female gender has to offer. Camille is incapable herself of cutting through the noise, the dross of existence, and separating what is important or meaningful from what is not. Is she really so proud to be of the sex that often is capable of listening to the wisdom of the scholar with the same enthusiasm as that with which she listens to the outpourings of stupidity that come of the proverbial village idiot?

Now we find Camille once again groping for excuses for the lack of female greatness. No, it’s not because of a lack of feminine creativity or talent—that is absurd says she. (I also think it absurd, but . . .) Oh, no. “It’s because women lack the obsessive compulsive need to create an identity separate from herself.” Now, this is absurd. First she pathologizes male creativity. We are “obsessive compulsive.” Good try, moron. No, women are not interested in achieving greatness normally (383). It is rare for a woman to take this challenge of challenges upon herself—and, no, Camille, you are not great. If you’ve ever known someone with obsessive compulsion, you know it is not common, and it is not a pretty sight. It is a horrible affliction. Apparently our lady does not know the reality of the disease. The paranoia that tries to alleviate itself through compulsive habits, to cut the anxiety in ways that don’t even help, but the person continues with the habits anyway. Again, she goes to great lengths to compensate for her sex. I guess you could say she is speaking out of extreme penis envy. Now, what is true is that women generally—not always—have no need to create something outside themselves; instead they literally work on creating themselves. As I have already imparted on my poor recently-assailed reader, to women almost all is self. The world is a fucking mirror reflecting things, and these things she collects, and her collection becomes herself. A life of mementos and souvenirs, things that become her. She is certainly herself, but there is no solid enough boundary to prevent you from being part of herself. It doesn’t matter if you’re around even, she may have you through some remembrance of your presence. One can consider such primitive feminine practices as voodoo and its related religious practices, the magical practices of witches even, at least to some degree—what is constant in these practices? The ownership or control of the other as if he or she were a thing. Borderline personalities displays a pathology that somewhat resembles the mind of a woman, her neediness, her black hole of a feeding self; I have already made the differentiation of sociopath and woman. The woman is acquisitive even of friends and acquaintances, extensions of themselves. The coup de grace, even their children are extensions so; when a woman responds to a baby’s cries one may think it out of an expression of compassion or love, but no, it is mostly out of concern for what has become a very important piece of themselves. This child is mine. Her child’s tears and her own are one, an exasperation and celebration of being. The woman can only emulate your system of values but never quite own them. This playful, bubbly creature so entertaining in her better aspects, so seductive when she feels the urge to be so, so manipulative and so full of feeling at all times—perhaps because of the constant interference of her ‘global brain’—this creature, in the form of our Camille, is desperately trying to find a realm in which the woman, she, is superior. How pathetic her every attempt though. As a final side note, to add dirt to Camille’s wounds, to add disgrace to defeat, women make the perfect patriots; because they only respond with care and concern to what is their own; they feel little sympathy for foreigners. Oh a woman can feel such feeling, if it is advantageous to her situation, but otherwise, Hitler or Lincoln, she is on his side. And please, after completing my essay—or not—study them for yourself. You have probably never done so in a meaningful and systematized way. Find out which of my accusations are lies, which truth. Let us now continue.

Paglia exclaims (claims, that is) that women have superior perceptual awareness. Yes, these earthy creatures are nailed to the cross of physical existence. But you’re too easy, Camille. I always get your number. A woman is, as you say, tied to sensuous existence, her material surroundings. But this has its impressive collection of limitations. For instance, memory, which woman is so well known for; it is easy for a woman to distort a scene or situation in memory, for she will only see things through her limited lens, the way she perceived, in other words, how things affected her, things remembered in her own favor or in her preferred arrangement. Men too remember things, but not as you wanted things to be. Men, gifted creatures they are, are also capable of forgetting, if not completely, capable of releasing the significance of events. So, who’s mind is working better (384)? Yes, I doubt that women far beyond the norm would subject themselves to my diatribe, but I doubt as well they’d subject themselves to Paglia’s. Oh, those women beyond woman!

Why though are women prone to whimsy and lack of focus? Camille has told you. Yet she takes pride in it. So, you too, ladies, can take pride in it. There is something magical to the whim; it is somewhat childish and very playful, although sometimes untenable and terrible. It shows no need to value things, lacking a sense of priorities outside of self-preservation, in fact, irresponsible and unaccountable. Whim is beyond reason in that it has no need for such a device. Why let thought and emotion weigh you down when you have supreme self-assuredness and the wonders of caprice? Why, for instance, are women poor suicides? It is because their torment is based in a simple loss of self or self-sense, whereas a man’s torment is based in emotion that is fed by repeated thought, some of which can be so seriously affected that suicide seems a perfectly appropriate path. It is easier to rediscover self, to, as it were, come to oneself than it is to escape a web of tortured thought and emotion, especially since they are more likely based on something actual. But let us remember that the self-concern of the whimsical female works the magic of relationship, for it assists her in finding an appropriate, the best, mate. She walks over one man to get to another. This ‘instinct,’ though it seems something of solid workmanship, does not always result in the best, for the female mind can never fully understand the male. She knows not what she is really getting. Her investment is made with a certain randomness. Such is caprice and is woman.

When Camille soon speaks of the shamans and co. incorporating the female into themselves, what she should say is the feminine, as in the feminine principle. And how the hell is this evidence of the superiority of women (385)? Maybe if more women were capable of incorporating the masculine . . . Then estrogen gives a pregnant woman “a kind of Buddhist totality of the universe.” Are you clueless, or what (386)? And to counter this, testosterone drives one “restlessly outward. One is restlessly incomplete.” Yeah, and something about a mere fragment of the whole. Wrong again (387). Testosterone does not always accompany restlessness, dissatisfaction, and violence; it can accompany creative contemplation and concentration; it can accompany creative endeavor, which can actually make one feel quite complete. If she had just said that testosterone sometimes makes one want to act, sure, but why the excessive addition? Again, “Testosterone drives one out. How needy testosterone is.” Needy? I think it’s well established that estrogen leads women to clinginess, neediness (388), yes, it makes a woman needy, for touch, for attention, love, and comfort—hell, for chocolate. “How complete estrogen is.” Hah! As I said, exactly backwards (389). Always turning things on their heads.

I’ll mention here that it is known that, with maturity, the man does not need the woman, but the woman always needs—it must not necessarily be a man, but someone or something. To refer back to commonplace understandings: it is known that women tend to be more needy and clingy, whereas the man tends to be distant and even unconcerned. But isn’t it nice that her feminazified audience eats up her hoaxes and half-truths. Chimes in dear Camille, “Woman’s mysteriousness seems to be part of her superiority.” But how is this a matter of superiority? This is indeed a matter instead of manipulation, of deceit, of play and pretending (390). The intelligent man sees through the act and, in fact, takes control. This creative choreography is definitely impressive and entertaining, maybe enticing, but it is often engendered by the work of men. The man renders the woman more mysterious than she herself is capable of achieving on her own. You, for instance, Camille, are not at all mysterious. Then we have “the mystery of woman’s reproductive anatomy.” This is a mystery to me, how a woman’s genitalia and inner organs could be mysterious. Mankind knows everything about her anatomy. We even know her menstrual cycle, her ovulation period. There is no more mystery (391). Pregnancy is completely predictable, save possible anomalies. Sticking with the idea of the mysterious, she swears that strippers are mysterious. No, strippers are naked or half-naked women on a stage, attempting to entertain horny men. That primal element in man—and Camille—known as sexual desire or attraction is not even mysterious (392). In fact, ask a gay man about this great mystery. Will he not in some way be repulsed, or possibly attracted to a quality that has little to do with sexual attraction, unless the stripper is a man. The vagina if mysterious because we cannot see its insides, makes the ass just as mysterious.

Now we have another great stretch. “Women’s sexuality is the model of the godhead.” Um, should I even respond to this nonsense? No, the model of the godhead is the mysterious relationship one has with the divine—which you don’t believe in (393). So why are you even fumbling over the concept? Then this: “Every religion is mysterious, therefore woman is divine.” What kind of misstep can lead to this claim? Absurdity has a name, and that name is Camille Paglia (394). How far did you reach up your ass to find this one? Isn’t the penis just as mysterious as the vagina? Why not? You don’t know its size and shape until you are naked before it. You don’t know it. Is the vagina even as prone to difference as the penis? No. But, “Man’s sexuality is so frail.” How? “The penis, how frail, how unpredictable.” And therefore mysterious, stupid (395). ‘ Unpredictable’ in place of ‘mysterious’ to bolster her false claim. Yet, she never says how man’s sexuality is frail. And to you, Camille, male sexuality is a complete mystery. Male sexuality tends to be vigorous, forceful, even violent, if not dangerous. When a man fucks you, dear Camille, expect no mercy.

And all nice of a sudden, she admits that women were protected in the patriarchal culture. But then she goes on a tangent claiming she wants to remove all special protections for women (396). What a lie. Why isn’t she headed to visit Congress, and try to remove the man-hating, hetero-hating, family-hating laws? Then she mentions the time when women were not allowed a vote, yet never mentions the time when men in general had no vote (397). This is bourgeois bullshit that feminists feast on. Then, from out of nowhere, she demands entry into football (398). Yes, sure, Camille, let us forget the skill that professional athletes have, skill they’ve gained through work over year after year of trial. Women’s sports, by the way, aren’t a sad sight already? The worst professional male athletes are light years ahead of the best women.

Now, Camille just drags her feet as she rides along: Men have killed themselves over women, have worked themselves into the grave over women, have brought home their paychecks simply to hand them over to women. Really! What a fucking laugh. Men kill themselves because they can; watch the women try and fail. Men work themselves into the grave for another glass of rotgut. Men forget their paychecks at the bar; then it’s time for mama to get a job—no money, no child support. You see how silly the alternate version sounds? Yet hers is so much more fantastic (399). Yes, sometimes men make sacrifices for their families, as do women. Family is family after all. Too much Hollywood for Camille. Then she makes herself smile contentedly by calling her assessment a queen bee and drone pattern (400). Yes, humans as bees. Why not call it the black widow syndrome, the praying mantis effect? As if these men did not enjoy themselves, live their lives, express themselves. Come on, if we’re talking the good old days, who’s going to pay the bills if mama gets the paycheck? This is all primarily the contempt for the working class that Paglia claims to hate. And how does any of this prove the superiority of women? This is like saying the damsel in distress is superior to the hero who wends his way through Hell to save her, only Camille makes it more working class and harsh so its easy for her middle class ego to make a joke of the man. Tell the woman’s story; at best, Cinderella, at worst a camera pointed at a halfwit ‘drone’ with tits. Oh, she may be quite glamorous, but who cares? Women. Sorry, lady, man took care of his family because they belonged to him, they were his. And a woman in such a bygone time-period who betrays her man deserves death, nothing less. Any honest man would agree with this, if he is in fact a man, not a pussy-whipped coward who bows to feminine and feminist wiles.

Paglia describes Victorian portraits. She says these women look like they are about to suffocate man. A praying mantis, no less. This is fantasy mere. Her grand phantasy (401).

Back to the woman and the idea of the man handing over his paycheck to her. I have another point to make here. Let it be understood that women are materialists in the most base sense. The man, unless he is somehow disturbed or womanlike, is not a collector of so many things. Boys have feminine traits; they too collect things, accrue things unnecessarily; men do not. Women are acquisitive and the man knows this. So, out of a sense of care and compassion the man may hand his chick some cash to satisfy her urges with his excess money. He does the same for his children. Thus women essentially, speaking historically, had the status of children. Women have no right of passage, no especial adversity on entering womanhood. Not like the man. The man’s life is one of challenge, and many adverse forces stand against him. Ultimately, when things are so reduced they become artificially polarized. But the general thrust of the roles holds true, especially historically.

Paglia, back to her specialty, claims that contemporary women are not satisfied with the idolatry of women. Of course, she thinks the college campus is all of reality. Why is it that women, even girls, dress like sluts? Why do they still yearn for gallantry? Even more (402), why do women still desire to marry wealthy and powerful men? Success is still appealing to women; they are happy to be mantle pieces in the homes of powerful men.

Then somehow the meeting of Hillary Clinton and Mother Theresa proves the superiority of women? Explain (403). Oh, they’re goddesses coming together. Unlike Bush and Blair coming together, two kings, two political gods shaking hands. How does she manage to cut off the complement in her little brain? Christina Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey and former Administrator of the EPA, proves the supremacy of women as well. How? How many men have been governors and EPA heads? Nevermind. I already buried this chick. Why disturb the resting place of the dead?

Then she declaims that women have more individuality and more intense personalities. Sure! MLK in a skirt! Wonderful (404). What is funny is that women are more likely to be collectivists and men individualists—save a Margaret Thatcher or two. Feminism has long promoted its half-baked brew of equality, while those who promote freedom must stand their ground against them. Oh, yes, this: “We are ready for female domination from the White House.” Why? This is a meaningless ambition (405). Then her misandry really gets the better of her humor, as she says our first First Man is to be dragged around the White House on a leash (406). Can you imagine if I were to say the First Lady deserves to be dragged around the house on a leash? I’m fucking evil, right? Where did this feminine evil come from? A dyke feminist with her mouthful of man-bashing. You see, you listen for twenty minutes, and then she bears her colors—as if she hadn’t already.

She gets into the Yale politics of money, and we’ll let that go. Isn’t it bizarre that she got her degree from Yale, and her first book was published by Yale, yet she has so many problems with the university. It seems a lot like her fight with feminism—artificial and hypocritical in equal measures.

Camille soon rails at women’s studies, which she considers to be a failure, and she claims was manufactured by men. Is this a joke? Oh, they put it together out of guilt (407). I doubt it. Who teaches these classes? Men? No, the superior woman, yet such creatures of the superior gender cannot put together their own curriculum. Camille wants to replace women’s studies with “sex studies,” men and women in the same program talking to one another. How generic an uninventive. How about gender studies in which we acknowledge the general tendencies of men and women—no, too much! Oh, and gay and straight people would be talking to one another too. This talking is typical of female professors; they’re all about groups and consensus. Again her grand theories of bisexuality take a back seat (408). Science would be the basis of Camille’s prescribed study—of course, with her pro-feminazi spin.

On to the area of art, a realm in which Camille plays the expert, but is in point of fact a poseur. So says she, “So much of art is a record of men’s helpless obsession with woman.” Yes, Michelangelo comes to mind, along with Oscar Wilde and Tennessee Williams. But, oh, they’re gay; they must be obsessed with their mothers (409). Show me Salvador Dalí’s obsession with women; it’s not there. He is a flamboyant free spirit, and he knows he is a master of craft, just as Michelangelo did. If this theory were true, the artist would never become good at his art. He’d be too feebly caught in his emotions over the woman of his obsession to develop his talents. The old notion of the muses is the obvious source of Camille’s unfounded claim. Sorry honey bunny, the muse is an arbitrary choice of persona electio.

Next she elaborates on her theory to include modern music, which, according to her reality-bending mentations, is filled with men’s love of woman and subordination to her. This is classic Camille (410). She states a truth in the same breath as a false claim. Yes, there are many songs written about women, but this does not imply or designate that he is subordinated to her. Just think of Axl Rose, of Layne Staley, both of whom sing of doing things to women they may not like. What about the all-too-famous Metallica, who have yet to write a love song—after thirty years. What about metal music in general? And not your hair metal, lame dame. I guess these are aberrations from her model. George Michael made a career of seducing stupid women with his songs, yet, as Nick Cave puts it in one song, he would “crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy’s ass hole.” How about Eminem? Eazy E? What about the songs of men written by women, which almost invariably display more obsession? And she says, “the entire body of popular music.” What a mujer desesperada. Soon, the movement toward art is an escape from women’s power. How many ways does she have to attempt this gimmick? This grand theory has gone from being the reason men turn gay to the reason men do everything they do; she is out of material—no new ideas. Her entire style is an aggregation of grand and unsubstantiable claims. And she’s far more often wrong than right (411).

What power? If such a power exist, why does man need to escape it? The Queen of England, for instance, has more material wealth, and hence power, than any other woman on earth, yet how much art is a result of a man attempting to escape her? Were the Sex Pistols, was Johnny Rotten, obsessed with her? How about your dear first Secretary, Madam Genocide Hilary Clinton? This is all so ridiculous. Only unquestioning dolts would admire your bogus theories. Then she does it, she mentions a known homosexual, whom I’ve already mentioned, Michelangelo. Then Picasso, who it is known liked to use certain women as his muses; but even with Picasso, your claims do not hold true (412). Sure, some artists had a love for the female form. But in older art, pre-Baroque especially, the female form is not even used on a regular basis; male models substitute for the feminine form. Show me any proof, by the way, of one obsession Michelangelo had over a woman—good luck.

She drags out the “emotional realm,” without taking into account that such a realm is completely different from men to women (413). A woman would self-destruct immediately if she were forced to face the affective realm of men—and probably likewise the other way round.

I’ll throw in a point because she once again brought up, Basic Instinct, that horrible film for which she recorded a commentary. This is what she considers art, or should I encapsulate it in quotes? ‘Art.’ On the subject of ‘art’ still, she pulls out Rossetti, the poet and painter, and his “Idolatry of women.” It is most hilarious that she would say such of this man, for all of his paintings of women are depictions of horrible frowning creatures, scowling at posterity, while his few works of men have a dignity fitting to their subject, especially himself (414). If one didn’t know better, for it is known he had some sort of relations with a few of his models, one would think him a woman-hating homosexual. And Christina, his sister whom many naturally assume at first was his wife, also a famous poet, may have as well influenced his view of women. To say the least, none of his female portraits is in the least attractive, sexually or otherwise. Maybe he liked fucking contrarian banshees. Yes, there’s the painting of the naked woman with tits bared that is more attractive, but it’s the exception. If these nasty, loathsome figures bearing the marks of self-love and arrogant human disgust are her best example of the “idolatry of women,” she is desperate for an example of such. It actually seems that Dante could see through these deplorable women, into the void where in a man a soul should be. Paglia’s soulless icons of the feminine.

Camille also loves to speak of Hollywood’s glamorous women, but never a peep about the flamboyant, intelligent, and charming men, whose talent made those classic movies the gems they are (415). Really, compare a Cary Grant to her beloved Katherine Hepburn, a Paul Newman to an Elizabeth Taylor, a Gary Cooper to a Marlene Dietrich. No, don’t; what use have you for men? Uh oh, I must be a total fag for liking old movies.

Okay, Camille brings up such a pressing issue, one of inequality. But, no, it’s not what you think. Did you know that lady models are paid ten times more than male models? We must remedy this situation right away. Oh, that’s right: fashion is an industry aimed at women (and a few gay men, perhaps). How many male outfits do these women seek to buy for their boyfriends and husbands? No, that would be such a waste. You see, this is a trick question, for it is not in a woman’s nature to be generous. Anyway, she wants to be the one to look attractive (416). So, yes, the female fashion of the season sells at a much higher rate. Men who want to be suave and look somewhat fashionable will buy a nice suit, maybe an Armani, if they have the money. Simple. Problem solved; no need for legislation. What am I? A feminist? It’s just a show, and it’s all for the women. Women need waifish women to show them how fat and unattractive they are—if only you looked more like a made-up corpse, my darling. Let us note that “the idolatry of women” in the fashion world involves women looking at women (417). If a man wants to get off on an unknown attractive woman, a sexy bitch, he’ll just watch a porno. How did Hustler become such a popular publication? Because men think so highly of the power of women? The magazine showed fully naked women, and a man could jerk off to it in the comfort of his home. Again, simple. Of course, Camille thinks strippers and, I guess, porn stars have a lot of power over men; if by power you mean the ability to accumulate money, yes power. But what’s that compared to the power of Budweiser, of ‘liquor salesmen,’ of the makers of shoes and panties and bras?

Lo! I caught her in another lie. “Most of the world is interested in the sexual beauty of women.” What about your Greek homoeroticism? What about Hollywood stars? Why is Krishna depicted as more beautiful than his female counterparts? Why did Renaissance painters use virile, masculine men to depict both men and women? And what about Mapplethorpe, your boy? Even Camille admits to admiring gay porn. But in the end she wins by losing, for women are so interested in themselves that the numbers must be skewed in their favor (418). So feminine narcissism sides with Camille. Then she brings up men’s fear of women again. What would a man’s obsession with the female body (and nudity) have to do with fear? Fascination, sure. But fear? We have another psychopathic, narcissistic, fascist Freud here; and her theories are based on . . . you guessed it—nothing! Camille has no intimate communications with men, so how is it that she claims to know so much about them?

Paglia namedrops a certain Nancy—a Nancy who? These boots were made for walking—fucking cute! Nancy Sinatra. And why was she famous? Oh yeah, Frank (419). But how proud is Camille of her Nancy? Oh, it’s so funny in that ‘I’ll let you do your little lady thing’ kind of way. Quaint. But then she calls it a great song. Mistake (420). And on a related note, Nancy Sinatra on Playboy’s cover encapsulates her argument for the supremacy of woman over man. What a weak ending. That’s all you’ve got, you brainless dyke? But, thank Jesus, it’s fucking over.

Now is the time for questions from her audience.

Get this, she criticizes feminist male-bashing immediately upon completing this lecture (421). And again she becomes the spokesperson for the gay culture, despite her anti-gay views, which are explicit in her theory of bisexuality.

Now, we get her half-view of World War II. She says if America had not intervened Hitler would rule the world. What a complex view. Hitler, swears she, was going to run right after Britain after taking over France. No mention of the Soviets; did they even exist and take part in the war? Ever heard of Joseph Stalin (422)? And Hitler did, after all, have plenty of time to conquer Britain, so why didn’t he do it? Well, some think that wasn’t even on the itinerary.

Another example of her speaking too fast for her brain to keep up. She says her parents gave her and her siblings birth in the late 40’s and 50’s, when she clearly means in the late 40’s and either during the 50’s or in the early 50’s (423). This is just one of her many weaknesses.

Next we have the cliché, men don’t know how to express their emotions. Anybody who says this should read the poetry that exists throughout history (424). What women really mean by this is that men do not express feminine emotions, which by their nature tend to be superficial and passing, and often come out unexamined, which have little to do with men, although men can express these emotions too. Men’s emotions involve much reflection and therefore complexity, unless we’re talking about some sort of immediate anger or its like. If men were more often to express their emotions to women, women would not recognize those emotions anyway; they would most likely invalidate them since they are not based in worldly occurrences in particular and whims more generally.

Camille argues that at one time women were considered too “emotional” and irrational to have the vote. What’s interesting about this is that since women have had the vote elections are far less predictable. Men generally tend to choose their side. Women, on the other hand are more likely to vacillate, and this despite the liberal tendency to defend ‘women’s rights.’ So, often politicians campaign with women in mind, their propaganda aimed at that vote, that of the more malleable crowd—it’s just easier to sway them (425), notwithstanding feminist influence.

This old idea that women are excessively emotional is somewhat half-baked. It is true that women tend to be extremely reactionary, and prone to outbursts and even outright hysteria. Women also tend to have a poor reaction to opposition, to others contradicting them, and especially to being bested. The fact that female emotion is its own type of feeling also comes into play here. The emotionality of women generally lacks the clarity of reflection and the insight of time’s consideration. As Camille has pointed out, women have little or no letup from the working of the right brain, whereas men tend to use one side of the brain at a time, one side reflecting on the other then vice versa. This may be the reason that women’s outbursts seem so irrational, and sometimes based on things unfounded. Women can as well hold a grudge, and even feel the need for revenge, but it is nothing like the intense and even long-term (sometimes life-long) grudges born of the male mind. As I may have mentioned, the notion that ‘women never forget,’ that women tend to remember quite a bit, especially worldly occurrences and activities, but the memory is altered by the woman’s sense of her self, her sense of how events affected her; she cannot normally separate her own reaction from an event, and therefore lacks objectivity. So, accuracy of memory is another matter of contention. Anyway, the fact that Camille relies so heavily on cliché ideas really says something about her supposed intellectuality (426). She further gets the idea of female emotions and feelings completely wrong, claiming for women “an emotional understanding.” No, ‘emotional interference’ would be a more apt phrase (427), once again considering that thought is constantly clouded by feeling. Emotional understanding and maturity, even the power of self-control (and therefore control of ones environment) is more of a man’s achievement. We could return to the reason women cry so much and so easily, but I think I’ve covered this quite thoroughly.

Further digging herself into her own grave, she declares that the “male shaman” would attempt to go into hysterical states, when in fact the shaman attempts to go into the very masculine intuitive state. You see, I may have failed to mention that intuition is a more manly attribute; men can cultivate it, while women can rarely even access it temporarily; indeed women tend to substitute a sort of whimsical version of this attribute, a ‘feeling’ about things that comes not from a higher state of mind but from a pre-established sense of the way things are or should be. We almost have an opposite here (428). Those women who actually have cultivated intuition in a meaningful way are most likely shunned by the general female population, anathema and alien, with concerns that are vastly foreign to what is normally considered feminine.

And, probably out of a sense of communion and commiseration, Camille celebrates a female student’s violent display brought on by hysteria. The idea that she actually advocates female violence while feminism criminalizes male violence just points to the double-standards and defaming of all things masculine Camille shares with her fellow feminists (429).

Then she throws a wrench into the works, claiming “Too much empathy at the top is going to paralyze a nation.” Oh my, lucky for us empathy is a trait more common to men than women and psychopaths. Yes, Camille, women should have no problem there (430). What’s the difference between the psychopathic leader who gives the smiling thumbs-up to the massacre of millions of innocents and the chick who works as his right hand—also smiling about the matter?

I’ll here reignite a bomb. Through my own experience, I have found that the closest being to the woman, in terms of sensibilities and social functioning in general, is the psychopath. Since we’re talking women we maybe should use the less harsh term for the type, sociopath. And what is worse, there are actual female psycho- or sociopaths under every other rock.

Back to Camille’s question and answer period, she tends to have difficulty answering the actual question that is asked her (431). She instead goes straight into some branch of her well-trod spiel. Yet she’s this type that would think woman the better listener, or even communicator.

Hah! A megalomania alert! She considers herself a “visionary.” (432)

To make everything connect more clearly, Camille is completely oblivious to the most likely conspiracy of her beloved feminism (433). To once again risk repeating, it is simply a ploy to get women into the workforce. After World War II, when women took the place of many men in factories and in various other workplaces, capitalist leaders realized that there could possibly be a workforce twice as large, with twice the ability to produce, twice the ability to earn, and the opportunity for the government to earn twice the tax money. In addition, children are raised by the state, indoctrinated into the system, and sent on their way as loyal subjects. They are herded into workplaces to replace the old, to outdo their parents; they become as well reliable taxpayers. Funny that I went in this direction because the next gem out of her mouth is that only Western capitalism has given birth to feminism—yet she’s still oblivious—in fact that’s a good epithet for her general mindset, oblivious (434). You see, now feminism has extended itself to various places across the globe, though its stranglehold can only be felt in Western nations still. Why does Camille have no insight into the workings of feminism? Why has she no insight in general? Oh, yes, that’s right. She’s a . . .

Again, Paglia patronizes men for their industrial usefulness. ‘Oh, you helpful working class stiffs!’ Please, Camille, extend your thanks to every area under the fucking sun, you ingenuous bitch (435).

Camille goes on to describe “bad capitalism,” which just happens to be the capitalism we have in the good old USA (436). You don’t have to be a communist to smell the capitalist flatulence that issues from our shores. Yet Camille obliviously continues as if in a foreign land. And, to make matters much worse, she mentions that greatest of oxymorons, business ethics! Please dear (437), shut it!

The computer has “equalized” the male and female contribution to middle class work, i.e. office and professional work . As if there were some great physical barrier for women before computers in these fields (438). Again, her dull-witted audience fails to cogitate. She just said something that makes no sense, and they smile. Please, I can’t be the only one capable of thought on this little planet. I pray for a more intelligent audience than hers. An audience of even one such fellow would do. And to add to her flagrant stupidity—for that’s what it is—she proclaims that this supposed equalizing is a form of “castration” for men (439). What does it take to be a Paglia? Hey you. Yeah you, the smirking dyke with the microphone. You are a brainless cunt. Imagine the pre-computer woman office worker dragging a box of copy machine paper across the carpet. My goodness! Thank the god of high-tech for the computer—oh, she still has to drag the box. Um, yeah . . .

In the home stretch here I may as well open the gates to Hell.

Paglia, ever incited to another grand claim: Since she works in Philadelphia, she is more in tune with the working class (440). What kind of silly bourgeois party chatter comment is this? Balderdash! It’s one thing to occasionally see others performing manual labor, another to engage in the work or to engage the workers in conversation.

Then one of the questioners is obviously a product of Paglia’s arrogant reformed feminism. She is a man-hating, patronizing bitch who needs her bourgeois teeth knocked in by an Archie Bunker or a Ralph Kramden. She shares Paglia’s sense of entitlement and her outright megalomania. Great work, Prof (441).

Oh, here we go with the fantasy of prostitution. To Paglia the prostitute is the ultimate symbol of liberated sexuality. Now, boys, when do you think the last time Camille visited a prostitute was? And did the pair smoke crack from the same pipe, shoot up with the same needle, or were they practicing safe-sex behavior? Women’s lib now involves the sale of her body (442). Good one. And the Hillside Stranglers were advocates of men’s lib—I already imparted that one?

By definition, because they are all based in distant history, all of Paglia’s ideas are outdated. Brothels, yes they exist where now? Thailand and Las Vegas? Most of the whores are on the streets, you dull and clueless wretch (443). And speaking for myself, I wouldn’t touch your beacons of liberation to save my life (reversal of reality). No, what is even worse—as usual—she is now talking about the “street-walking” prostitute. How sick is this? Then she mentions the drug addictions of the street walkers, but she has to resort to history to pretty up the situation. A trip through the prostitution of the past, then we are back to contemporary times. She describes a prostitute in Philadelphia whom she sees as a sort of classy goddess! She glibly throws out the bathwater to save her baby. And what a godlike baby it is (444). Would Camille have sex with this woman? Of course not, but that’s beside her narrow point.

An intelligent young lady in the audience displays a small hint of insight (beware!) into the fashion industry, noting that the designers choose boyish-looking women, tall and slender (flesh and bone) with no tits, as if an extension of the homoerotic. Then Paglia, in a fervor of glee, congratulates gay men (whom she delegitimizes, as we know [445]) for their contribution to the fashion industry. She effectively nullifies the young lady’s concerns by contradicting them. In the late 60’s, says she, the fashion magazines were the cutting-edge of female change. A fantasy world, yes (446). The model, she says triumphantly, as if to negate everything she’s ever said, is a mere clothes hanger (447). Now isn’t that empowering; these goddesses of glamour seem to be more mannequin than sovereign. Their Providence, it would seem, lies in their wooden character. Then she contradicts what she just said, as her audience fails to note, claiming, “Great fashion models are not merely physical beings.” They are, according to the great prestidigitationist, actresses, mimes—they are choreographed (448). And here someone gave me the idea that they were clothes hangers—who was that? Oh yes, the wonderful continuum on which the past, even the immediate past, disappears as if it never were; two things contradictory can be true, just not at the same time. The world of the woman. The fact that she hasn’t transcended these feminine limitations points one to the level of her dialogue; how much you are not, Paglia.

Here’s a strange one. According to our Camille, world-oriented people (which, as we know, would equal women, for the most part) misunderstand fashion. They must be visually educated—one supposes by one of her feminist death squads. These people have “a puritanical inability to deal with the lurid image.” Her use of the term lurid makes one wonder if she doesn’t mean to use a better term. The lurid image, yes I love the lurid image. Let us look through the Merriam-Webster to better understand:

lurid

1. a : causing horror or revulsion : gruesome

b : melodramatic, sensational; also : shocking <paperbacks in the usual lurid covers — T. R. Fyvel>

2. a : wan and ghastly pale in appearance

b : of any of several light or medium grayish colors ranging in hue from yellow to orange

3.: shining with the red glow of fire seen through smoke or cloud

One supposes she’s intending definition 1:b. So, how is one visually educated to better understand the melodramatic, the sensational, the shocking? The first is understandable, but how are we to be trained to expect the sensational and shocking; obviously, if we were educated in it, if we were expecting it, it would no longer be sensational or shocking (449). Thanks for clearing that up, Merriam-Webster. And why would word-oriented people have trouble understanding fashion? Are not those who write of fashion word-oriented? You need to try to make sense, against your every inclination.

She compares herself to Andy Warhol, as if that were a good thing (450). Then goes back to fashion: “Works of art for the masses: that’s what’s going on in these fashion magazines.” Okay. Then she shifts to gay men and their eye and talent (you know why: 451). Then she actually brings in her theory of why they’re gay: their relationship with the mother, of course, “whether it’s fear and awe, love and devotion, whatever it is . . .” Now how would love and devotion to ones mother send someone gay? Are you saying no straight man has love and devotion for his mother? Fear? Awe? I’m afraid of my mother, so I want a big cock in my mouth (452). But somehow men—oh, sorry, gay men (452)—have known how to make women look their best. She essentially says her questioner doesn’t enjoy the fashion industry because of her indoctrination into anti-fashion. What an argument (453). Truism? Here answer is really that something is wrong with the young lady who presented the problem. Yet, in a way, she affirmed what they young lady was saying: gay men use women who look like boys to express a variation on homoeroticism (454). But Camille is not done. As she would have it, gay men since the French Revolution have been making women look good. (Again she worships men she cannot even validate, these anomalies: 455). She probably doesn’t remember the parameters of the original young lady’s concern, for she has accidentally confirmed everything the girl said.

Oh! She moves on to an example of herself behaving violently toward a man who offered her his chivalry (456). Why does she feel it’s alright for her to behave violently toward men? And women?

As an important note, Camille is far more immature than the student speakers who follow her, all of whom are quite reasonable, questioning the silliness of the entire proposition that women are superior to men. She is also less clever and less humorous, not to mention deficient in self-reflection. She just rides on her hauteur and fame (457).

She makes and incredible (literally, incredible) and unfounded claim: “All of the romance has gone out of sexual relations.” Now you can respond to this on your own, by I know it not to be true for myself, and I’m verging on a fucking sadist (458). But we must remember that this is coming from a militant dyke, so she would know this to be true—for herself. Poor loveless Camille.

Camille then declares that chivalric ideas are based on the idea of women on a pedestal. I love how simple her notions of her world are. And she wants you to share her poorly thought ideas. Chivalry goes back to a time when women were considered the lesser sex to such a degree that we could not understand it with any modern reference. She also doesn’t mention the differences that exist among the classes; the working class broad is far less dainty than her bourgeois or aristocratic counterpart. Yes, chivalry is an act of love or care, maybe even general politeness. But to make this proof of the godliness of women, as she really wishes to do, is ridiculous (459). I do not let you go before me in line at the coffee shop because I place you in a heavenly light; I am merely being kind and hoping to make you feel good about yourself. Yes, we know that women like these sorts of things, and some of us enjoy making others happy—maybe it’s the feminine in us—or rather something of the flamboyant, that androgynous quality.

Another claim that holds no verity. “Sex for young people in the 90’s is getting more and more boring.” What would she know about this? Is she conducting studies? No, she’s having boring sex with “young people.” Again, true for Camille, not for everybody (460). Then back to the homosexed. She says there’s more homosexuality (461) because of the lack of sexual romance (462). Do I need to explain my critique of this poor use of logic? Okay, I will. First, there is no proof that homosexuality is on the increase. Second, again this lack of romance is a dreamt up idea that lacks foundation. Is she again talking about herself? Is she going dyke because her relations with men (all in her mind, of course) are less romantic than they once were? Her male fantasies are in decline. All of these phantasms of the male sex are getting too forceful and demanding. Let’s take a moment to let her feel the shame she is incapable of—damned narcissism! The ghost of premature ejaculation.

Camille notes that the working class is sizzling with sexuality. What she does not seem to know is that her feminist laws, man-hating, hetero-hating, family-hating, are fucking with the lives and sex of these people (463). Then she reflects that the poor middle class men suffer the brunt of feminist nastiness. (Wrong! Everybody does, and most of all men.) In the working class a gender war was introduced into their midst by feminism, involving arrests (mostly bogus in nature), restraining orders, and child custody suits that always favor the woman. A woman can physically assault a man, and he can be sent to jail because of it. Disgusting, you overrated twat!

For a while she repeats her canned spiel, so we’ll skip it.

And this, she thinks women are too stable and see the world too realistically to be either great at something or be horrid rapists and murderers (464). More excuses for female mediocrity; some day women are going to have to man it up a bit, and not by putting on a macho hauteur and eating pussy. Woman are less stable than men, and surely do not see the world more realistically. These are ridiculous claims, and they’re made to excuse the mediocrity of women. Tears, childish rages, and hysterics are regular activities of which sex? Women do see the world more materialistically, if that’s what you’re calling reality.

Now a point for Camille’s lack of artistic taste (465). Sappho, when viewed from the present, is not very impressive. Try reading some Sylvia Plath. Have a laugh at the expense of the lesser sex with Jane Austin. Read a book, lady. Go meet a neuroscientist. Get it right!

She actually claims that a “deformation of the brain” is responsible for genius (466). Is this her last desperate attempt to excuse women from responsibility for their mediocrity? This is such a groundless and idiotic notion that she deserves an intellectual beheading.

Then she bemoans so very ingenuously the price children have paid for the professional success of women (467). Yet she wouldn’t have it any other way. Camille gives not a shit for children. Still on the subject of children, she actually proclaims that infants don’t like men (468). This coming from a woman of experience with both infants and men, right? What a windbag, and an unfuckable hag only a lesbian would kiss. I and many others know this to be untrue. Now, if she said teenagers don’t like overbearing and hysterical mothers, I would agree.

Here she goes into feminist family-hating. She claims the nuclear family was never meant to be. To her, the extended family was better (469). Yes, that and the ‘government family’ that raises the kids thanks to feminism. Then she claims that working class Americans still have extended families. Again she’s living in the past (470), more to the point, her own past.

Then she contradicts one of her earlier statements or claims. She admits to a possible future without maternal birthing. Oh, I thought the man was just a brief ejaculator with no bearing on birth, a “pin prick”; now the woman is not even that (471). But she was just joking before, right? No. Just face the facts of this nature that you claim so much to love. A man and a woman are involved in making babies. Yes, sometimes men have sex with men and women with women, but when it comes to reproduction, a man inserts his penis in the vagina of his woman and hopefully both have an orgasm or two before the man ejaculates into the woman’s vagina—and if it is the proper time of the month, the woman may get pregnant, and even then there are no guarantees. That’s your Sex 101 for the day, Doctor. So, until we start cloning ourselves, and by that time you’ll be dust, we need both a man and a woman to make children. And sorry to burst your hymen, but it is generally agreed that it is best for a child to have two parents, one of whom spends most of her time taking care of the child during its early stages of life.

You see, the problem with her concern over childcare (and children growing up neglected and under-loved) is that there is only one obvious answer. Mothers must be mothers. But as a feminist, and a militant lesbian, she would never admit to the conspiratorial side of feminism (a capitalist creation to get more workers and tax money and to indoctrinate your children). No excuses can get around the need for parenting. This is actually why some of us, wrapped up in our personal endeavors, do not have children; we know that it will take up the majority of our time and energy.

Oh, how tiring: men’s attempt to escape the mother goddess over their shoulder. If this is true why does it strike me as a total fiction? I have good relations with my mother; I have no fear of her, I do not overestimate her, nor do I worship her; she, in the end, turned out to be a loving and caring parent. Because I have had no real escape from women, as you intimate I wish to have, I can speak of them with some degree of confidence, all based in experience and insight into that experience. I love women. I wouldn’t want them to be like men. I do not turn to women generally for rational insight, for reasonable argument, for their reflection or emotional stability. One does not always desire these things; if he did, he would most likely live as a hermit. This, I think, is why Camille never mentions Cindy Lauper; because, actually, not just in song, girls just want to have fun (472). And notice she says, girls. Many women refer to each other as girls, especially when around one another, in a group of women. It’s a tacit admission of the lack of rites of passage, a lack of a certain break. It’s the Peter Pan thing, you know; girls, women, want eternal youth. Speaking for myself, I would never want to return to my youth, nor to my teen years, nor to my twenties, and I’ll say the same in ten years about my thirties. Women want not just eternal youth, but freedom from the constraints (and many they are) that men take for granted.

Here’s one to remember. Because Camille knows that we know she has no regular contact with men, she claims to understand male psychology by looking into the eyes of her male students, a claim so magical that only a childish woman would make it (473). She also claims that in five minutes you can get any man to admit to woman’s superiority (474). Yes, this is some sort of New Age magic show. What kind of man do you speak of, Camille? One chained in your basement with a knife at his throat?

This idea that women control men (and are superior to them) is Camille’s wet dream. I suggest that this cock-hungry dyke just pay up and get fucked; I’m sure her rent-boy would even allow her to call him names if she paid enough. Notice that she never says anything about a woman salivating over a big ol’ cock. Nope, that would be an admission of male sexual power, and Camille is oblivious to such complements. Yes, men lust for women, and women lust for men. Got it? No, she doesn’t. She mentions the inane five minute mark again (475).

But it gets weirder. She believes in polygamy. Why? Perhaps she’d marry a man to get her tongue on his wives, to make harvest of his harem.

Camille then ‘admits’ we have a system in which divorce is a rule. But she, of course, never connects that up with feminism and its baleful effects (476). Was there some other family-destroying ideology that brought this about? She actually claims that men have gained from the divorce epidemic. Is she lost to reality or what? Yes, alimony, child support, never seeing (or rarely seeing) your children or fucking your wife, but paying for them all to live. Yeah, men love to pay all the bills for the families stolen from them.

Now she mentions in a celebratory tone a woman who killed her husband and his lover for his having left her (477). What a fanatical hypocrite. I’m sure she celebrates every time a woman drowns her children or cuts off her husband’s penis. Female psychopathy is entertaining to this psycho.

Then she gets to the reason for her love of polygamy, the reconstructing of the extended family. This is the waste product of a demented mind. She really does hate men though—no, she just doesn’t give a damn about them (478).

Soon she begins bemoaning the fact that women lose status with age. As if men gain it! Yes, if you’re filthy rich. Without the banks full of your own money, the you as a man also lose status (479).

Now, we approach the touchy subject of feminism offering a legal service to women of other cultures. Is it interfering with the culture? She’s too dimwitted to see this (480).

And her theories of crime and criminals is seriously uninformed. Her idea that the dainty women don’t commit crimes is horribly wrong. There are so many crime shows on television and so many books on the subject that it is just lazy to blindly theorize (481).

Then the talk of male sexuality. Why does she even talk about male sexuality? It has nothing to do with you (482). And she has no experience with it. Her talk of men is even more flawed than a gay man’s talk of women, for the gay man still interacts with women. Not Camille, only students light her mind with masculine ideas. She is clearly a full-blown lesbian. Then she admits that she has tried to hit on men, but she’s had horrible problems in that department. Revealing (483). What a way to end her talk of superiority over men. I told you she’s cock-hungry—and she’ll die that way.

Camille Paglia com Marcia Tibun e Guntar Axt, na FLIPORTO (I may have this last video title wrong. I only use it because she is 63 years old at the time of taping.)

Camille boasts of being the first openly gay student at Yale. Perhaps she’s given up the ghost of her old theories, but I doubt it (484). Then she makes a bizarre declamation, that nobody was interested in sex before her (485). She then walks over old ground, Hollywood and bisexuality, then the first dyke at Yale thing again. Then she claims again that professors damaged the young ladies they had affairs with—remember that she only has relations with women far her junior, young enough to be her children (486). Don’t you like that a professor hitting on his graduate students is demeaning while prostitution is not (487)?

She serves up her ingenuous talk of female responsibility—there’s no need for the laws (488). The lie lives. Nature and pantheism, dressing up, gay men, Marlene Dietrich, and Baudelaire (489). And gay men’s love of movie stars, female stars in particular (490). Yes, gay men saw the drag queen essence of Hollywood starlets, specifically Dietrich. She doesn’t like what she calls the new “androids” of Hollywood, Lady Gaga and the superhero women in modern movies. I agree with her here. Then she uses drag performance pejoratively, using to describe women ‘acting’ sensual without properly expressing it (491). This must not be the “pro-drag queen” Camille.

Paglia then gives us a theory that Marlene Dietrich modeled herself on the Witch Queen of Snow White. This is what happens when senile academics start commenting on every little thing. They let their book-encapsulated imaginations go foolishly into every little realm (492).

And the moment Camille became a lesbian, while watching Showboat, a scene with Ava Gardner. Yet she extends her Ava lore to include Frank Sinatra’s blues and heartache, which came from the way Ava dumped him (493), another silly claim by an academic bored of books. But there’s more Ava lore. You see, she was part black, through her father’s side says one clueless source on the internet. Another source, far more reliable, claims that her father was a devout Irish Catholic and “a bigot who hated niggers.” But, to explain Camille’s delusion, the idea comes from the movie already mentioned, Showboat, in which Ava plays a mulatto whose identity is not at first revealed (494). Show me a quote of Ava saying she’s part black, and I’ll believe you. You’d think that someone who lived a full life would at some point admit to her heritage, and indeed she most likely did: She’s the daughter of a racist Irish Catholic.

Her mythological view of things is interesting, even enticing. A liar who loves myth? What are the odds?

She says it’s nature that caused the ‘imbalance’ that forces women to be maternal. No, it is feminism that forced an imbalance in what was already established by nature (495). She says, it’s an issue for feminism around the world, whatever this means.

By now we’ve heard Camille speak of her working class Italian-American background. One thing she’s loath to mention is that her father too was a professor. She leaves this out usually, a lie by omission (496).

She talks of a restraining order as a “challenge.” How often does a man consider a restraining order a challenge? Rarely, no doubt. Perhaps in cases of profound psychosis (497). On the subject, she finally admits that men in America do not consider violence against women to be okay. What she fails to mention is that many women consider violence against men to be perfectly acceptable (498). Now she complains about the cliché sexual comments of construction workers toward women. I thought that was a part of why women were superior, their power over men. And what about your great relations with the working class of Philadelphia, Camille (499)? She’s proud that feminists managed to arrange it so that construction companies that hire such workers get no government contracts. More legislation! What a two-faced bitch (500). She continues, complaining about how degrading it felt to be treated like a “piece of meat.” What about the power of prostitutes and drag queen feminism? Do you think drag queen would complain about this? Really, at this point, Camille is so unattractive that not even an old crack head would ogle her. Just more ingenuousness (501).

Again with Madonna, who was a “whole new path for feminism.” No. Before Madonna, girls and women were already rejecting your sexless feminist hoopla, this tired ideology of an outdated generation or four. They were wearing makeup, dressing up, doing their hair, and acting girly. Madonna brought nothing new, except maybe an act or two of sacrilege toward the Catholic church (502).

Then she pulls out 15-20 years worth of canned stories. She really stopped thinking of new ideas long before this point.

Now, coming toward out ending, I’ll take a controversial view. She says, “Art is not propaganda.” It’s only propaganda under Hitler and Stalin. I would argue that propaganda is constantly coming out of Hollywood. Many artists turn their works into propaganda. Even non-political artists engaged in propaganda. Michelangelo painted propaganda for the church. In medieval times, the same thing. Greek and Roman art was so much propaganda for religion, politics, and ideologies (503). Yes, not so controversial after all.

For no apparent reason Camille brings up gay men again. They were, she says, connoisseurs of the arts. Then gay men loved pornography. What is this, really? Both statements are bold exaggerations. Many gay men care nothing of the arts and do not like pornography (504).

Camille then confesses not to know why lesbians fall prey to ideologies, agendas, theories, personal anger, and psychological turmoil. Sounds like she’s having dating issues. But a simple answer to her confusion is that these lesbians are women who spend their time in the company of women, thus increasing the female nature of everything they do. Then add feminism, and you have a bloody mess (505).

But Camille claims in her eleventh hour that she took the gay male view of beauty and of art. As if there were such a view (506). Then on to more canned stories with slight variations and less than notable additions. And our primary source of disinformation, Camille, complains of bad information on the internet (507).

The French language, we are told, was limited by Racine. But what about those that came between then and more recent times? What about Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Corbière, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Claudel, Valéry, and Jacob? What about the Dadaists and Surrealists? Your hated philosophers were not the first to use more modern language (508). But she continues, calling the Post-Structuralists vandals (509) with no elaboration.

Then she betrays what an old codger she had become, offering that “Students know nothing.” No, Camille, stupid students know nothing, possibly your students.

Then we get old Harold Bloom as a “visionary rabbi,” who is “prophetic.” If he were ‘prophetic’ he would certainly have better understood literature. I mean, come on, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry? More like a groper for aesthetic understanding (510).

Says Camille, Nobody ever asks of an applicant for a job how scholarly is this person. What about professors? Nobody cares about their scholarship? What a matter of controversy.

And it’s over. Thank the Lord. Now the torch is dropped in my petroleum pond; my ship is sunk.

Yes, after all of the nonsense I’ve waded through, it should be known to all that Camille Paglia is an intellectual fraud. Now, I doubt that makes her an academic fraud, but it certainly puts her in her place among thinkers. She is not sane, she is not insightful, she is not intelligent, she is not any kind of authority. If you don’t believe me after all of this, I’ll convince you yet. You may be offended over my delineating the qualities of the female mind in relation to that of the male mind. But where is your theory? Where is Camille’s? Why is this such an untouched area? Why are you all so frightened? Come out and show yourselves.

(I thank Knut Nordson for his invaluable assistance in completing this essay.)

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