Transcription
Hi, what's going on everybody? Welcome back to Philosophy Insights. Camille Paglia has been one of the most critical voices in criticizing modern feminism since the 1990s. Today we explore why she criticizes the very movement she identifies with and what makes her descent so significant.
>> Now I notice uh you wherever I go in the world actually that um upper middle class career women are very unhappy. They're very unhappy. Okay, even though they might have achieved a certain status. Um, and what I'm saying it's not that that fe feminists have to stop blaming men for their own unhappiness. The unhappiness is due I believe to huge systemic changes that that women for for you know for thousands of years women had their own world. There was the world of women and there was the world of men and the and the sexes didn't have that much to do with each other. Okay, this is a brand new experiment to have this new system where now women can be uh economically independent now they're no longer dependent on father or husband or brother okay for their sustenance right but and they're working side by side with men in the workplace right this is an experiment it's never happened before right and what what what I'm call I was saying in the book that we may have to accept a certain amount of tension between the sexes in the workplace, right? That the feminist idea that if we can just suppress men enough, women will be happy. I say no. Okay. I say, okay, and it's on the basis of my own experience as a child in Italian-American immigrant community. Okay. Is that what women have lost is the old solidarity that they once had when they totally ruled the private sphere. The women's life all day long was with other women. ones multi-generational older women, okay, as well as the children, right? It was a huge tribal experience. And now what women are are feeling is a sense of isolation and loneliness, disconnection, okay, from from their old function. I'm not saying to go back. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just saying stop blaming men. All right? Like for example, these these marches that just happened, okay? People the women were exhilarated. They were they were almost hysterical. Okay? I don't think it had anything to do with feminism or anti-Trump or anything like that. I thought it was that women suddenly felt that surge of happiness again for being with other women. All right. Right. You can actually see it in the in the Odyssey when Adysius is is washed up naked and alone. He's lost his ship, you know, on on the on the shores of Aisha. And he and he wakes to the sound of of of girls, women's voices laughing and singing and so on. It's the Princess Noekia going down to do the laundry on the shore. Okay. And actually that is exactly what was going on up until fairly recently where women were all together. They did all their chores together. They they did the the laundry. They did the cooking. I can remember this from my childhood in Endicott, New York, upstate New York. The among the immigrant Italian women. All four of my grandparents plus my mother were born in Italy. Right. So I I actually had that experience. the experience that went on for thousands of years in the agrarian era, women all together. In fact, my mother described uh as a small child in Italy, how um all the women would get together to do the laundry and and go up the hill to Ilsorgo, which was a fountain in a cut out of the side of the mountain probably went back thousands of years, you know, to the Roman period and so on. She remembered the singing, you know, they you know, the picnicking, etc., etc. Okay. So there was a there even though people were were were laboring physically in the agrarian era there was a happiness okay a sense of identity there was no quest for identity.
Now, it's no place for an independent thinker. Okay? If you were an independent thinker, you had no options as a woman except to become a nun. Okay? So, I know, okay, I know I would have been a nun, okay, 100 years ago. All right? I know it. Okay? And obviously, you know, communities are are intellectually repressive in their own way. Nevertheless, we're in a period now of quest for identity. tremendous pressures on young people to to form their own identity separate from those old automatic tribal and community affiliations. So I think there's a tremendous I'm as a classroom teacher you know of now you know more than 40 years I can see this and and it's really um you know there's a tremendous sense of psychological lo dislocation among among young people um and and they and they find many ways uh to try to achieve some sorts of of of identity and part of it right now of course is social media uh which is causing the total you know uh entropy in terms of ability to to reason to to read to write you know the old so on.
All right. Now, um I'm also calling for um an end to this this insanity of excluding biology, okay, from gender studies. Now, how in the world did this happen? All right. How did women's studies and gender studies end up teaching about gender without any reference whatever to biology or to hormones? Right? I was and and right now post structuralism dominates gender studies everywhere you know I I didn't I I mean I spent six months writing my dissection of fukco okay what is that 27 years ago now give I mean assignment hello anyone who thinks that fuko is somehow um you know they the master of the universe has clearly not read my exposure of him in junk bonds and corporate raiders all right I mean the man was a fraud I'm Sorry. Okay. There is compared to Freud, okay, I mean Freud is out and Fuko is in. All right. The post structuralists, all right, um, you know, pose as leftists, okay? But what were they doing in the past few decades with this with this crazy parasitic growth of this administrator master class, okay, that has taken over the universities, right? at a period of obscene, okay, rise in tuition costs, student debt that's crippling families and so on. Where were these leftists, the great leftists, okay, on our college campuses? Okay, were they resisting the the administrators? Okay, were they denouncing student debts? Okay, were they lamenting, you know, the the plight of adjunct teachers and so on? No. They were all running to conferences talking about Fuko with their stupid elitist jargon. Okay, that I mean you think they thought that's that's leftism. Okay, these post structuralists are the worst mercenary careerists. Okay, in this country, right, the leading post structuralists, okay, and new historicists are retiring as multi-millionaires. You I mean and they pose as leftists. Okay, it is a scandal for geuko for heaven's sakes. I mean, absolutely absurd. Okay. So, we have to bring biology and authentic study of um you know of of medicine, of anthropology, of history, you know, back into gender studies. That's one one thing I'm I'm definitely calling for.
Now, in aside from these things, okay, there are number Oh. Oh, I I you I'm on the war path against okay, the bureaucracy of the campuses. Okay. When when I at Bennington College, my first job in the 1970s, we actually 1976, there was we had an uprising. Okay. as a as a faculty against the trustees and the administrators, the president of of that college and it was like huge publicized. Norah Efron went up there and wrote it up for, you know, for for Esquire magazine and so on and and the faculties are are totally castrated. What are they doing? The the faculties have absolutely been marginalized in on, you know, in this country. They didn't utter a peep as this administrative master class took over. this this the administrators who are in league with federal um you know ma mandates or federal authorities in in Washington. I mean we we're we're living in an age of Stalinism right now. Okay. And again the leftists have you know they talk talk a big talk. Okay. But they do nothing where it really matters. Okay. Which is demand you know 50% reduction in the number of administrators. Okay. And also you know 75% reduction in their salaries. Okay. Which often exceeds that of of the of the faculty members. People should realize how many of the ills that I'm I'm decrying about the suppression of speech and free thought on campus are coming from the administrators, okay? Who are these, you know, who are these social welfare dogooders. Oscar Wild, okay, was absolutely scathing about these humanitarians, the these aggressive philanthropists who dominated uh the Victorian period. All right.
At any rate, in terms of other things in the book, um there there's a reprint of uh what I consider an important piece of mine in Time magazine where I called for the end of this outrageous in age 21 law in the United States where young people cannot buy a beer. Okay, you this is a you know nowhere in the world except in very repressive regimes, right? Uh you know like the United Arab Emirates and so on. Is there anything like that? Okay. What was what what exactly were mothers against drunk driving? Okay. What they they wandered into an area here that has been extremely destructive when that rule was passed 1984. Okay. What did young people do unable now to to drink? Okay. They began taking the club drugs of course. Okay. Ecstasy and ketamine and all this crap that they take into their bodies, right? And what's happened to the ability, you know, of young people to go to a bar, learn how to drink in a sensible way, in an adult context, be able to sit in with with it with the opposite sex, learn how to talk, how to flirt, discuss ideas, okay? It has absolutely a cruel law. No one has raised. You can buy marijuana in Colorado, right? And young people can't get a get a glass of beer, okay, when they arrive in college. Do you realize how outrageous that is? Now, why aren't you more outraged? Okay. That has to end. All right.
All right. Um Oh, yes. So, I just just to return to what what I was saying about the um about the you know the solidarity of women in the agrarian period. I I feel that probably part of my ability to uh to analyze things come comes from my exposure to almost a kind of a capsule condensed version of the of of human history. uh I I experienced the agrarian era through my contact with those those those powerful country women uh of who had who had immigrated and there's a whole piece in my book about about southern women about um uh the you know the the power of the rural paradigm and in the strength of of of southern women and so on. But uh we we were a whole town of us really from Italy concentrated in this uh area of um the triple cities in in in upstate New York because of the shoe factories, the Endicon Johnson shoe factories. So I then had a direct experience of the industrial era which followed the agrarian era. Uh that you know my my grandfather everyone in the town went to the factories which dominated endicott whether the smoke stacks in that period before environmental laws the the soot would be heavy you know on window sills. You could smell the the tanning pools and so on. So I had experienced the industrial era and then my father fresh out of the of the paratroopers in World War II was able to go to college on the GI bill. I was born while he was in college. My parents married at 20 and had me at 21. So he was like mopping the cafeteria floor. Uh the only member of his large family to to go to college. Then he became a high school teacher and then a professor at uh Le Moy College in Syracuse. So he so we then we moved into the new surface sector you know economy right so I in my own life I've I've experienced all these transitions in in human history so I think I I think it's given me a kind of um insight into change now what I'm saying in the book is that those women the country women okay um were more powerful okay than any feminist okay they were physically powerful literally in that period before automatic washers and dryers everyone did laundry by hand I can remember my grandmother washing ing on the back porch with a washboard. Okay, they were powerful like this. All right, and these women had big voices, okay, and big attitudes, right? I mean, in fact, once um when my father was teaching high school in the small farming town of Oxford, New York, we lived for a year uh in the upper floor of a farmhouse and there was like a hilarious moment. My father was out with with with his brother. They were uh standing outside smoking a cigarette. Uh and suddenly the you know the the farm woman uh yelled at them. Okay. A calf had escaped from the barn and and and she said, "Stop her." Okay. To my my father and uh my uncle and and the and the calf thundered by my my father and my uncle just stepped backwards as it went by and the farm woman went chased the calf and came back carrying the calf. All right. And as she's passed them, she said, "Men, okay, those were the women for thousands of years, you know, country women had physical power and mental power and they were the equals of men. In fact, it is no coincidence that that um the first states and territories to give women the right to vote were the were in the west, okay, that it was the pioneer areas, okay, where where um it was obvious that that women were the equals of men. Whereas it right to the very end the the educated states the states where the great universities were uh like like you know Pennsylvania, New York State, Massachusetts and so on refused to grant women the right to vote. Not until the the constitutional amendment was passed you know 1920. It's because the differential between between the between the upper middle class man upper middle class woman okay in the late 19th century and early 20th century was very profound. Okay. The lady, a lady seemed to be a different entity, seemed to be far more emotional, tended to faint, you know, it tended to be rather delicate, etc. All right, so the idea of of granting such women uh however admirable, you know, the right to vote was not as easy as it was for the for the uh the territories.
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