Your Provocative Idea for Tuesday: Camille Paglia Is A Male Chauvinist Sow

In her great short essay,  I Am The Cosmos, Molly Ivins got what should have been the last word on Camille Paglia, the allegedly thinking man's Judy Tenuta, going on a quarter of a century ago.   But the arc of the actual cosmos, being long even as it bends towards justice, Molly Ivins is the late Molly Ivins even as Camille Paglia spews ever more of the bilge that should have gotten her universally ignored instead of in the second page headlines.

One of her latest attention getting statements, the entire substance of her, uh, thought, was to the effect that men are hard wired to be rapists, that changing that is impossible and efforts to prevent rape on college campuses* is done by puritanical sticks in the mud who aren't groovy and who are not cool and who are emasculated by emaculating second wave feminists and.... Well, I am putting words in her mouth but as I've come to consider Paglia as sort of the intellectual bastard child of the late Timothy Leary at his most fragmented and Professor Irwin Corey at his most brilliant, it's easy to imagine what kind of thing might come out of her.  Not any possible substance, just the texture of it.  The Paglia product isn't discursive, or coherent, it's not patterned, it's splatter painting in words and seemingly randomly chosen phrases and cultural references.  You could empty a card catalog on the floor and randomly arrange randomly chosen texts on those and come up with the equivalent.

With Paglia, we don't have purpose of substance but we do have motive of form and content.  The first and foremost purpose of her entire career before the public is to get attention for her and her stuff published and, more importantly, her on camera and in front of a mic.  Getting into ink is all there is to it. The way to do that, even in 2014, is to appeal to the college educated, ignorant, affluent, white, straight, men who determine who gets what she wants.  And, so, we get her telling men that they should just get in touch with their inner rapist and women that they should groove on it.  It is the one thing that I've come to conclude about her and, more generally the pathetic shambles that backlash "feminism"** is that it is a capitulation to the men who run the publishing and media industries and the advertising industry.

Yeah, I know this is a bit on the disjointed and attenuated side, even for me.  I've got Benadryl intoxication as an excuse. What's hers?

*  Like so many a second and third rate piece of lit and, so much of what the dolts who work on college campuses concern themselves with is campus life, hardly a reliable representative sample of humanity.

**  It's a lie to call what she and the "third wave" "feminists" call "feminism,"  It is to feminism what democracy is in a "Peoples Democratic Republic,"  the name used to cover a lie.   It was produced, first and foremost, by women who wrote for men in porn and other parts of the publishing industry that sponsored the backlash against feminism so they could continue to use women as objects.