Camille Paglia: Provocations

well it's wonderful to be back at the at the festival I think the last time I was here was for my art book glittering images in 2012 and this new book is my 8th it's a collection of pieces published a wide variety of places some very obscure and it's extremely eager to get some of that material filing you know into a major public space in particular I have this massively long essay called cults and Cosmic Consciousness religious vision in the American 1960s I think it demands a rethinking of what the legacy of the 1960s was about it wasn't just about politics it was also about culture it was about a kind of perspective on the universe you know full of full of wisdom and daring and I think right now with the with the political passions surging in the United States I think a return to this to me you know the expanded vision the expanded imagination of the 1960s is absolutely critical I think you know one of my primary themes has always been that there is a higher vision a higher perspective that takes in the whole of the universe that the society is important but it's only a small box in the vastness of the universe the Society you know we which I've obviously haven't been paying I've been analyzing political issues political personalities political ideals and failures and you know in my in my work but in in no way would I identify myself purely in partisan terms I don't think any intellectual should be partisan or rather than in real life here you belong to a political party but you don't you don't make the mistake of thinking that that political positions and membership in a party is that kind of new dog my new religion so what I'm calling for in this book as an as in my prior writing is they returned to consideration serious consideration of religion I'm an atheist but I have been calling for 25 years now for the you know the ideal core curriculum for a multicultural perspective in colleges is a study of the great world religions of we're talking here about Hinduism Buddhism today of Christianity and Islam I don't I don't know how you can understand any other culture without knowing the religious premises of that culture and also by studying religion you are able to you able to experience poetry of the highest level art architecture mythology and so on the you know the present doctrines that's a fuse elite education in the United States seem to me utterly pernicious I've been railing against post-modernism and post-structuralism for a quarter century and in warning warning warning warning of the results of gutting the humanities curriculum as has been done and now we see it all around us you know a whole generation of young people who parents are bankrupt bankrupt in themselves send them to elite schools to receive an education basically cynicism and chaos there's no sense of historical perspective history is regarded as a false narrative any that we that is imposed by Power Cells who are simply interested in establishing and spreading their own personal power and so on just like list stick kinds of canards in flowing from the mouths of professors who have made no serious study of history now what you get with me is someone who was and very interested in archeology from earliest years and my first job I wanted to have was a urologist when I say anything about culture contemporary culture even there I have behind this my sense of history not just to the great civilizations of the ancient Near East but back to the Stone Age you know I mean I don't this is none of none of my opponents in in a khadeem have any kind of scholarly perspective of this kind I don't regard them as scholars in fact we have big thing you know the leading figures in a khadeem of my generation are careerists they're they're professional cynics they pretend to a leftism that is is false because they you know these people are multimillionaires the leading leftists and you live like kings these the leading leftists on college campuses said nothing about the gross expansion of a tyrannical administrative class of bureaucrats they said nothing about the obscene rise in tuition costs which have had such a horrible negative effect on families and burdened so many students with with a debt they said very little about the enslavement the servitude of adjunct instructors in paid a pittance and denied benefits and so on okay what kind of leftism is that okay okay pretty phony okay all right but it much like enjoy be laboring my opponents by was much else in my book I'm I'm very happy to finally be able to get my my piece about their early piece about writing for the internet and finally you know in two public arena here because I was a co-founding contributor to salon.com from its very first issue in 1995 at a time when hard to believe the web was not being taken seriously by many by academics by other journalists in fact a a prominent political journalist at the Boston Globe warned me told me why you why are you writing for the for the web no one takes the web seriously now on you know the web has this giant tsunami for good and for ill has has you know has I mean cause the the slow financial sinking and eventual extinction probably of newspapers themselves which is to me a tragedy I feel I learned a great deal from newspapers there's something about the physical newspaper turning the pages surveying it scanning the news taking all the news in that you really can't get via the web my main news intake now is is from the web but it's it's I know that my students don't read newspapers and that after my generation goes dopey no newspapers left everything will have moved moved to the web I think is extremely unfortunate because it what it means is that is that journalists now don't work up you know through small regional newspapers learning how to go out there with shoe leather and pursue a story gather facts death like a detective in and then arrange all these facts in a in a rational logical manner and then have an editor okay there to provide feedback for this material now people are you know what's coming out even from the New York Times oh my god has the New York Times degenerated you know oh Lord I mean it's like it's like the level the the columnist SAR like the level of women's magazines okay of you know from Beckman when I was growing up just like this but a little a lot of pouring out no sense whatever that an article that one writes okay has a structure or should have a structure that perhaps it should have paragraphs okay you know that perhaps it could be edited and shortened and being far more forcible if condensed I I'm lucky enough to have been able to write for the newspapers at their height okay still in the early 90s before the arrival of the web or web journalism a lot and I loved it because the very things that most professors consider limiting that is the you know the space considerations I you know I found very stimulating to be able to to express all of one's points within 800 words or 900 words the classic op eds truck sure as it was developed originally by the New York Times I think and then and then often at you know a deadline there'll be some other issue the piece will have to be shortened further because the you know the art department in cases like that had a big lavish illustration would always you know eats up space so that was a real discipline that period and now with the web you can go on and on and on as long as you want but you know beyond that but what I'm hoping people are noticing that as some of these Tony literary journals like the New York Review of Books go online that you you can see how fossilized the prose of those journals is when it transfers to the web you try to read it on the web these things that are written for The New York Review of Books or even The Times Literary Supplement and so on alright and and oh my you did the verbosity the velocity you know the is it's clinging to a style that's really quite dead so I what I in my essay about writing for the internet I described how my salon.com column evolved and how I learned that to write for the web your writing for your writing for a screen your writing for the TV monitor okay essentially and now of course people are reading an iPhone but you're but it's it the writing for the web the web is a visual medium and you have to you have to write in a different way forward as you would write for for essay in in books oh I did I detailed my process of discovery of that and how I conceived of of writing for the web as floating blocks sort of like a Mark Rothko painting floating in the air and and I and I deliberately devised visual details and and and games you know in for for it that that the words themselves should look interesting on the patient this is this produced my my salon calm which I I say and nobody has snapped back about this yet but you know if they do I will I will crush them right my salon column was the first blog okay my salon calm invented the blog and no and no one okay was writing like that okay writing in a personal way by personal events and so on at length on the web I maybe before me you had Mickey cows writing the only other person doing anything parallel was Mickey cows with his political column I bet but I was already writing for the web before he started and so you know I I feel that that's my part of my part of my legacy I think that some of my my language my intonation I find it everywhere people that may sort of become almost the voice of the of the web and in in ways alright so there's that I'm thrilled to finally get out into into print again and I have been eager to get my my essay on David Bowie if I finally it was commissioned for the for the catalog of of the giant costume show that the Victorian Albert Museum in London did in 2013 and spin the whole show has been circling the world and people turned out in multiple generations of people turning out to see his costumes and so on so this is a an essay I wrote about about gender in the issue of it's called you know David Bowie said that the theatre of gender David Bowie at the climax of the sexual revolution and what I'm establishing as if it needed to be established was that the current the current dogma of gender studies you know of gender is performative for heaven's sakes David Bowie was way in advance here and anyone who was alive and breathing okay in the early 1970s would have been influenced by these ideas you do not need to hack your way through a lot of post-structuralist garbage to get to this idea of a gender or human behavior as performative in fact it was in you know the great work you know the presentation of self in everyday life by Erving Goffman great Canadian American sociologist whom Michel Foucault stole from as he stole all of his ideas from prior figures all right but let's not get sidelined there you know I just love to punch Foucault all right he knew nothing when will people realize this but so there's this might the David Bowie essay I'm I'm very eager to to be seen you know in general book and also my piece I'm so happy finally my piece on Tom of Finland okay that it was commissioned for the passion during a German publisher that this fantastic art books they did the complete collected works of time of Finland giant volumes and asked me to write on him and he is those who don't know he is the creator of the leather look over the sadomasochism leather look okay for that was became such a dominant icon during the period just following the Stonewall Rebellion okay of 1969 so notice 1970s gay men in internationally okay we're imitating these leather clad persona of of time of Finland's like he's incredibly influential it he's not really taken seriously as an artist because he's regarded as an illustrator but you can scarcely imagine an art you know any anyone in the arts having greater and more enduring influence than Tom of Finland okay and then my usual themes of about education I'm after teaching for 47 years I'm an absolute despair about what's going on in the public schools I think it's an absolute disaster I am well positioned to sense what's going on I'm not one of these you know professors of thee I'm teaching I teach at a small art school I'm not I'm not teaching at one of the big Harvard Princeton you know we're the only only students who come through are those who you know are the most eager beaver you know best students you know internationally and so on I mean that's not I at my school the students where I've been teaching for 34 years this the students have to audition or have to present their work in order to be admitted to a program so essentially my school is a vocational school and because of that also the they come from a great range of social and economic backgrounds therefore I have I do have some students you know from very good suburban schools but I also have have students from the inner-city african-american dancers and and jazz musicians and so on including talented dancers from farms in North Carolina so it's a huge range so I'm able to monitor what they know if each each class that I have I'm you know it's about it's not too I don't do those prefab things okay where it doesn't got preface this day we're gonna do this this day we're gonna do that okay I'm you know I'm always reading the the group and say what what do they know or not know and what do they what do they need and I have been horrified I think it's probably for 20 straight years now I've been horrified as year by year by year the amount of cultural in general cultural information that they're able to recognize has has diminished but also the absolutely major landmarks in Western culture also have receded I it was 15 years ago I've told this story before if it was 15 years ago already when I was in my art of song lyrics chorus I was dealing with thee with the the great Negro spiritual go down Moses which I had done in year after year before that and I was having trouble on this particular day I played the song look at the lyric and I'm trying to explain I'm trying to talk about it and I just felt this there's a resistance I felt it was carrying the entire class and I couldn't figure out what what it was since I taught that before and I it suddenly hit me with with horror that no one recognized the name Moses right the only people who did were african-american students who have a church background because of course the church remains a great center of community in african-american culture and I and I was in despair about this and I remain in despair because you know what here we have a good example of the failure of secular humanism maybe there's people you have parents not raising their children with religion because it's it's the liberating thing to do while I impose all that on them as a consequence this whole this access to the Bible one of the most most influential works written this compendium of Hebrew poetry with this great hero legends and so on in it and so there's a whole dimension of the the history of culture that is lost when young people have no religious affiliation whatever but when when young people no longer recognize the name Moses okay you know what is left of Western civilization what and they they know the Kardashians okay that's that's where we are and that's the level we're at so that's another of the the you know issues for me one of my ambitions always from the star okay was to develop an interpretive technique that could be used for both serious subjects scholarly subjects and also for popular culture and it's hard to remember a period when being interested in popular culture and thinking it importance was considered rather de classe and and actually show that you're not a particularly serious person and when I was in in graduate school there's absolutely no doubt okay I was in graduate school at Yale from 68 to 72 there's absolutely no doubt that I lost you know I lost a lot of points with the professors who found that frivolous that I was interested in Hollywood and Hollywood history European art films were then it you know didn't had a cultural status coming from out of the 1950's into the 1960s and so on but not now Hollywood movies but I I've always taken popular culture seriously and I and I long to be able to develop an interpretative vocabulary and in an approach that would work for both high culture and what used to be called low culture I'm I call myself a Warhol light because Andy Warhol's influence fell on me very very heavily he came from a an immigrant family in in a factory town in Pittsburgh and so on and he too saw you know the beauty and the magic of of advertising and of the great stars you just take a photograph and treat it some way my photograph of Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe these are just movie stills he wasn't even it wasn't that he was actually even drawing the original pictures and then Warhol's I was lucky enough in college in upstate New York to be able to see Andy Warhol's short films just literally within a year of him making them and these short films have disappeared off the cultural map I know they're available at the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh but they're otherwise people have no acquaintance with them they seem to mix up Paul Morrissey's later movies like trash and flesh okay with what with these you know the early films are these improvisational rather grainy black-and-white films rather absurdist that Warhol did with with drag queens and with with male hustlers and edie sedgwick and etc that had absolutely an enormous impacts on me so I remain a Warhol light by which I also mean that and this is a point I've repeatedly made that pop art ended the avant-garde ok the avant-garde was killed by my pop art event guard had been a noble tradition going back and said the romanticism to the early 19th century in terms of terms of painting and the avant-garde artists source who are trying to develop a new style they paid a price for their for their non-conformism they in poverty okay in derision the loss of status etc so there's one avant-garde movement after another of the very highest heroic level you know that went on for 150 years in the arts and then what happened with you know pop artist when pop when pop art embraced popular culture and and mass media via Warhol and Lichtenstein and so on that that space the oppositional space between the Fine Arts and the surrounding media culture ended so now since Warhol since pop since pop art you know art visual arts have been struggling for some kind of identity they were different they're sort of mini movements performance are is probably the most long-lasting David Bowie can be regarded as actually part of that in the nineteen seventies Eleanor Anton am I've written about and glittering images was also part of that but right now okay we're in a period where that where avant-garde gestures are mined ok hypocritically mimes by people that you you do mind them do something shocking take a religious image ok Catholicism is the easiest target ok and treat it in a very very negative way and oh wow you've made an avant-garde gesture well it's absolutely grotesque ok derivative and and you know just contemptible contemptible because it if if you don't if you don't pay a price for your avant-garde gesture it's not avantgarde it's just playing to the gallery okay it is increasing your you know it's increasing your income okay it's getting you're getting you attention and acclaim I'm sorry it's just it's absolutely the thread trip through this book are the pieces I wrote condemning you know the Brooklyn museum's handling of the Sachi show I criticized Jane Alexander's report okay about the National Endowment for the for the Arts and I think exposed the you know the folly the the provincial ISM the insularity of the of the elites in this country who now the entire are lead is cut early shot through with political correctness and with with bromides and cliches and I see very very little happening in the arts that is genuinely new any longer I personally believe that creativity in the arts has migrated to animation okay to to to game design okay and to industrial design yeah I think that that it but if I can judge by the kinds of you know students in those fields that I've had at the at the University of the Arts there was real conceptual energy you know in in those particular fields but the traditional Fine Arts have have withered and waned all right so now in this so what else is and is in my book well aside from the I have Rihanna was the only person the only performer I remain interested in is Rihanna I'm I'm always interested in seeing the latest Daily Mail photographs of Rihanna coming out okay hot early from a nightclub at 4:00 a.m. in London wearing fabulous colors on her nail polish so I mean I think I think she's truly are you know truly an artist in terms of not only the work she's done in music but also in in fashion design she's completely independent and not to mention those those x-rated instagrams that she was doing for a number of years but then I unfortunately stopped because her mother okay and Barbados put her foot down okay and and read her the riot act and I believe I may have played a slight role in that and that's all in the book okay and I feel sad about that but I paid so much attention to the instagrams that's suddenly her mother found out okay at any rate uh Joan Rivers okay I was a great role model for me in the book Gianni Versace there are a lot of dead people okay like no the death of Gianni Versace the death of Norman Mailer you could just feel the sort of passing of the garner Martha Stewart okay at the height of her scandals oh and then I have pieces a piece like I have a number of things that reflect my teaching my classroom teaching and one of them is teaching Shakespeare to actors which is it was publishing a book about Shakespeare and I just you know just common sense just you know how how does one look at the plays as something to be produced rather than something to be read you know I'm the page and let's see number of other things here I mean this is an enormously long book and it was only a fraction of what I've written I couldn't believe how much I had written a nightmare how much I've been writing and there's no way to catch up to it yeah to all of it but but I think it's a strong piece in the book is a speech I wrote on free speech a for a free speech forum at Drexel University a couple of years ago and I take a very extreme position on this which is that you know free fall and free speech are absolutely the essence of democracies okay there they are the essence of Education and the inability of universities to enforce a free speech on their campuses they unwillingness to do so I think it's a major scandal absolutely major scandal and I think exposes the gross corruption of the administrative class which now runs things I don't know if you realize that that you know universities are no longer that the the faculty have no power okay all power has been stripped away from them by these these overpaid and very and very self-assured bureaucrats who are who you know they really are the primary engines of a lot of this political correctness on on campus but I find particularly appalling the the failure of so many professors nationwide in the u.s. to be able to to understand that when they're in front of a class that the class is not there as a laboratory for their particular personal ideology I think it's perfectly justified if a professor says what his or her review points are but they must be presented okay as opinion and and the teacher must say c'est si most simultaneously all of you okay are completely free to take any position you want on any issue if it's totally opposite to mine okay and the the failure to do that the professors actually think you know they have they have the right to dictate to militate to tyrannize you know to bully and so i'm it's shocking to me how these people got into the profession and it has to do with it with the general collapse of any idea any scholarly standards whatever okay in in in the most in the you know sort of the high neon feels it really started with women's studies okay weird I'm saying this as a fact as a feminist I'm someone who was writing about gender before second wave feminism I was reading about it in college I was writing about it I was my dissertation sexual persona I was hard to believe now was the only dissertation on sex at the Yale graduate school when I when I was there then after that within a few short years everyone was writing writing about sex of course but Women's Studies was created I've been trying to get people to see this for decades and perhaps now their eyes are starting to you know open about it women says were just created with a snap of the fingers okay by administrators who who wanted to make reparation or visible reparation for the exclusion of women from so many faculties the the few number of women that were on you know the elite school campuses at that time the undergraduate colleges of Yale and Princeton went co-ed okay that period when I was in in graduate school and and and when the studies just it was just it it began as essentially window dressing in order to Telegraph that this this college is enlightened okay we're just so don't just throw a lot of money at some women okay and let them find their way to create women's studies now this makes no sense this is a mate we're talking here about about the creation instantaneous creation of a major scholarly field it required some thinking through in terms of what would be the training of majors in this field what do they need to know and in terms of anthropology social history and biology okay how was it possible that the gender studies is now called has been permitted okay to just spread to flourish without any reference to biology there's no requirement whatever okay for undergraduates to to have even a single semester of biology now you can end up deciding biology is irrelevant right but not to not to expose students to it instead to create an instant cannon of new books okay by contemporary women studies professors who in the beginning many of them came from English departments they didn't even even come from any exposure to social history and the end result is MIT was it was what's predictable because now we have a completely impervious you know most like the politburo okay and campus after campus and and the excesses of Gender Studies have like spilled over into into real life and are affecting and so now now we get you know in Hungary there's you get you're getting you know efforts on the far right to ban gender studies completely from the universities because it's it's an ideology you know and not in a scholarly discipline I thought what and this is a principle that I have observed it's in my it's in the book we in terms of my writing for salon and so on which is that when when when when problems on the Left are not dealt with okay are not honestly and courageously dealt with those problems go underground and gain in force and will eventually erupt on the right this is a principle I find in you know there's examples in the book such as what happened when when Janet Reno sent you know tanks to go knock down the walls of citizens at the Koresh ranch and you had a fire in which in which adults and children died and the media said nothing about this whatever incredible a violation of normal the normal humane procedure on the part of a democratic government they said nothing okay everything was suppressed because it was the new Clinton administration so what happened the issue went underground got fiercer and interrupted two years later in the attack on the mural building okay by that fanatic right-wing fanatic okay who killed incredible numbers of people all right so this is this is what's happening now is that gender studies isn't ideology okay it is not a scholarly discipline as personally constructed in the universities right and why does why wasn't this dealt with on the left why was the no critique critique on the left nothing and so it goes underground and now erupts in Hungary on the far right and so that's just and I think a lot a lot of items in the book include especially in the media Chronicle in the back of the book that show how I believe prescient I was as a Democrat in critiquing in my salon column problems in the Democratic Party problems in the the the trending of the party toward toward lawyers okay and toward Goldman Sachs and things like that and that these problems could be seen very very distantly I but no people didn't want to deal with it and so as a consequence you get again dissatisfaction among the populace going underground and so I I was not I was not surprised a Democrat I was not surprised by the election of of Donald Trump then people who could be surprised or those who like it had this rosy eyed view of of democratic ideals which were not in my view you know being met I'm a Bernie Sanders voter so I think that I'm hoping to serve as a role model to young people writing about politics to say that if you really want to write or study politics and analyze it and you know and become known as and as an as an analyst you have you have to in some way rise above your own of partisan instincts otherwise just fall into the same you know dualistic dead ends okay that were in so many people I mean you can have you all you that's what a discussion of of politics on TV has become utterly enervating this really you Peter on one side or the other everything is pitched okay on the shows as you know if in terms of opposites are you going to wave me oh I have five minutes okay all right thank you all right this is a pre-plan okay I have to be terminated okay okay what does I think about TV oh it means hard to believe that in the 1990s they were like there were really good shows on TV even crossfire which it would seem like those are opposites you know two people taking opposite views actually a range of viewpoint was actually actually permitted on TV once you didn't have to fall into a box like and have people screaming at each other with me you know these shows now you know what people are gonna say before they open their mouth but honestly it was not the case it's in case you know there were so many examples one of my favorites was um in CNN CNN in company at 11:30 a.m. and I believe it was Kathleen Tillotson I believe she was a southern lady this was when when CNN was more based in Atlanta and she would have everyday three women three professional women on by satellite all different women just to discuss the day's issues and without any no assistant producer getting on the phone ahead of time and drilling you know and finding out what are you gonna say on air okay just letting us talk on air and and it was I think that was marvelous I think that you know most people's political viewpoints are flexible they're not crazy polarized in rather child childish opposition that it has encouraged in American television by the way I'm not I'm not kidding about those assistant producers they are a plague okay I I refuse I mean I don't go on TV anymore it's useless right but but they are I will refuse to do those I mean insist a producer wants to find out what you're gonna say excuse me they're taking all the energy out you know and the spontaneity out of your actual performance on the on the show itself I wish people would fight back against that it but if speak of childish okay it's a grade school it's just so the level of American television of course the media in general have I speak as a professor of Media Studies I mean journalism is dead I mean some big stinking corpse okay in the United States right now forget you know forget that all right Oh what else what my last things here I have to pick and choose here oh I hit so many things though Wow okay all right oh I'll make my big statement about feminism okay all right let me remind okay people who have read me before okay or I am an equity feminist that is I believe in equality of opportunity for women in the professional and political realm removing barriers with our advancement however I oppose all special protections for women I feel that special protections of any kind are ultimately patronizing paternalistic and infantilizing I want to treat the workplace as a gender neutral zone and in which yes okay if cases of sexual abuse should be pursued but I believe that it's up to individual women also to communicate through their manner and through their speech in their actions okay what they will tolerate and what they will not tolerate I find that there's no in my view there is no excuse okay for a highly educated upper middle class woman okay professional to be saying that she does not have the power okay to say something back or to this gold or to complain or whatever I think that I think it's absolutely nonsense that what that is is a woman putting her career advantage okay over her innate dignity and self-respect and that it is the working-class women who are really unable to fight back women who really depends on an income for the children and so on perhaps their single parents etc but all this complaining okay bye-bye middle-class women I about and this invoking of of an oversight panels this is what what I absolutely love as a you know as a veteran of the 1960s for heaven's sakes is this deputizing of paternalistic figures who are now this power of surveillance over personal life and person personal behavior I think it's a terrible mistake okay this whenever you have a growth of any kinds of of a bureaucracy bureaucracies have bloat and bloat and bloat okay and eventually become tyrannical and it's actually the history of the of the decline and fall every culture and it should be built into every bureaucracy some sort of mekin constantly curtails its size and its power the you know the situation of college campuses is outrageous I mean I I have taken the extreme view all along and I'm a college teacher K which is that college administration's have no business intervening in or surveilling students social lives I take the extreme view on it none zero okay if a crime is committed on a campus give it to the police this business of of now you know paternal paternalistic figures on campus taking you know taking listening and hand-holding and hearing about what happened on a dates what kind this is this is such a betrayal of the of the you know the of the sexual revolution of the 1960s which my generation of women I had so supported we want we want independent lives independent thoughts okay into independent relationships with other people and not these nanny figures okay these substitute parent figures constantly hovering okay are we ready - okay okay [Applause] are you defining second wave feminism and who would be on the forefront of that second wave feminism well obviously Betty Fernan is the one who kicked into motion when she founded the National Organization for Women co-founded 1966 it was the first organization a political organization devoted to women's rights since in America since women had won the right to vote in 1920 so she had a pivotal role in setting it but then she herself quarrel with other members of now and what she was eventually booted out of it and part of it won one of her many her lists of you know she's very abrasive personality forceful foreign personality I admired her but she was a she could be unreasonable and and it was when she called you know the young lesbians you know that the lavender menace okay but there was this big written revolt you know against against her and you know the book when we look back at you know at The Feminine Mystique which was a surprise bestseller in 1963 yeah when you look back at it there are a lot of problems with it such as there are no sources okay the whole thing is unsourced okay right and the and in the list you know the list of grievances and disasters that she says flowed okay from the woman's you know lack of professional opportunities and life and so on I mean it's everything she'd like that she lists that cancers you know body cankers it's like I mean like every every possible human disaster every plague okay like plagues of locusts okay you know I came from and you really can you can you feel the hysteria in the book there's also things in it that are that are very surprising such as she rejects she rejects abstract expressionism foreign films it's a rather provisional culturally speaking but it integrate the other people took over okay if I by the early 1970s you have you but you have Gloria Steinem okay emerging as the face of feminism and it but betty Friedan resented it but she said though gloria goes to kenneth to have her hair streaked which was true right and gorse then it was very photo telegenic okay at a time when television was very important and I admired her it's gonna be hard to believe okay but Time magazine without yes subscribe to actually ask the question okay in the early 70s who would make a good you know first woman president and I wrote in Gloria Steinem do you believe it okay and yeah because I said oh when age has dimmed her beauty and so on and so on alright now I thought better of it okay anything later on but she said Steinem okay Steinem has a man problem okay they say this this this this this this anti male thing got embedded into feminism from a lot of these there's some women who are really borderline crazy women at the very beginning okay there's some really radical ones right but Steinem you know she was she's not an original creator of ideas but but she was a wonderful presence I mean she's she's the one who really established that was possible to be the reasonable person okay and you know an attractive woman okay and be a feminist that you were not always like and her talking like that right so all right so what happened was I tried to join I mean I I was you know I was yeah I'm like this completely heterodox personality aggressive always in trouble etcetera so I tried to join the women's movement I got booted out again and again and again okay I've told I've written about it okay like you know that like was 1970-71 when I had that almost that fistfight okay with the New Haven women's liberation rock band okay alright because I because I was defending the Rolling Stones okay machining argument about the song Rolling Stone song under my thumb and I said look I said under my thumb the lyrics are sexist yes okay alright but it's a great this is a great song and if in fact it's a work of art okay and I still maintain that that under my thumb is a work of art okay you have incredible marimba okay and Bryan Jones in there it's it's been phenomenal so if you listen to the lyrics in an intelligent manner you can see that there is a it's about a power reversal okay that's almost like something out of William Blake where once she had me down now I've got her down well you know in William Blake he'll get him down again in the next you know the cycle etcetera it's like the whole power dynamic of sex by oh my god oh there was like a heart and they're probably spitting in my face and they said they said I said this is a work of our arts aren't nothing that demeans women can be art did you hear that I'm gonna repeat it okay i these feminist rock musicians said nothing that demeans women can be art right there you have a the Stalinist view of art okay i foul Oscar Wilde my first influence it was like a book called the epigrams of Oscar Wilde that I I stumbled on with a secondhand bookstore in Syracuse when I was 14 right and I Maxim's about arsh and about the independence of art and an arts freedom from philanthropy and and in humanitarians and all these do-gooders and so on right and I didn't quite understand everything in that book but now I understand it okay everyone wants to clean up art make art politically correct okay make it manageable okay make it palatable okay so I mean we need another Oscar Wilde and right now but wait not back to your question right wait what was what was your question it was about about things all right I think the second wave of feminism yeah yeah okay so it's like Gloria Steinem is the face you know a feminist all right Kate Millett was put on the cover of Time magazine for her book okay sexual politics or and she didn't she didn't particularly like the attention or want the attention from it and and so sexual politics is is the book 1970 that is it were 71 that create that created the template okay of which is which is this you know taking ideology waiting in you know into some famous book by a male artist or a and with your rubber stamp going misogyny sexism like that you know on Kate Millett created that style okay alright and and even to this day people go on about about her she was this she was that well you know I the veggie Ford and the anniversary of that book okay and you know I contributed to like roundtable things talking about that the impact of that book I thought I wanted to take a little look at sexual politics again and I looked at that book and I think there's a lot of problems with that book okay there are all kinds of problems because it's to me it's very odd that Kate Millett okay that the rest of her life she never wrote a paragraph that was even remotely like that book all right she went out she because she wrote memoirs she wrote she were all kinds of you know other other things she became a sculptor you know up and up the Hudson or whatever she was doing and so on and I you know I really think that someone needs to dig into the history of that book hey I I hear a voice in that book that is not her voice I hear another one I think it's a man's voice okay alright and it's a man it's one of her professors it's either a professor that she had at Oxford or it's a professor at Columbia right and I and I think it's if this man in her you know in the acknowledgments she does have a list of names and there so there was a you know a couple of male professors and so on but I think that you know if this book this book which became so important and monumental and still remembered as a landmark of new feminism so on if I want it to be admitted the degree to which a man okay it used his knowledge okay his syntax okay hey a contributor to that book okay she did not honestly acknowledge how much I mean I don't think of us all all that okay but I hear a voice that is distinctly older than our generation because issues like my generation I think roughly although I think she's a little older than me but but there was a certain sound of that Columbia professors had yeah that I began to pick up because I have I have met and had such great relationships were actually graduates of Columbia the great books program of Columbia for some reason we're on the same momentum though for some reasons obvious ok they have read all the great books right and then they're there for their minds are structured ok and organized in ways that post-structuralism can't even hope to do all right anyway um then later on there was Andrea Dworkin okay and then in the 1980s she became a leading figure of second wave feminists and then there was a third wave in the 1990s that sort of sputtered up and sputtered out and there was like Naomi Wolf and you know Susan Faludi who was and who Gloria Steinem embraced okay in a famous Time magazine cover you could find it on the web okay where they look like terrorists or like underground people clinging to each other in a bare room what kind of vision of feminism is that these two would but but that's where Gloria Steinem gave her you know imprimatur to Susan Faludi who you'll notice it's a foodies career immediately sank after that I mean she came she came out she came with a memoir but about two years ago about her father and you know having having now turned transgender and wherever he is in Europe and and now and now she's recounting the horrors of her childhood and her father you know attacking her mother's lover okay with a knife all over the house blood all over the house I thought this is her childhood right and this me I want I want feminists you know to come from good families okay in solid family let well why is every single feminist you know like Traci you know Gloria Steinem I mean she's written a lot about it but her mother was it was mentally disturbed and Gloria Stein had to had to nurse her the father abandoned them to a rent filled apartment and so and this is likely this is why they're so anti-male okay they're just inside their father's it's not right this I have been trying to get the anti male you know obsession of feminism out of it okay for a decade after decade after decade and I you know I constantly say only weak women cannot admit the strength of men and of the great achievements of men okay I've learned incredible amounts from men okay all right I admire men okay all right I don't feel like you know say old they're all toxic and they're all yeah and like always you know a little little claws out and so on and so forth right and it's gotten really bad you know you all know how bad it's gotten okay where everything about meant anything masculine is automatically defined okay as social construction please okay my father's generation went to World War two okay my father was a paratrooper I've got all my uncles they were in the Navy you know and the army and so on I saw men okay men who could do anything okay you know men men who's going to take a piece of wood and like me capable man yeah men were respected women there was no abuse okay that I was ever not you know my whole is telling the American experience upstate New York never an example of anyone dishonouring a woman or abusing a woman okay these were men these were incredibly you know talented men who could do anything okay I have like knuckle in my maybe you know my uncle would make on his off hours absolutely work of art okay and so on you know my grandfather would be making baskets in the backyard they they worked worked work to they gave gave to women and children men have been sacrificing for women or children for like millennia and so instead we have all this like focus on that on the horrors amend that with the worst men the brutal men okay well every every brutal person should be it should be jailed okay obviously oh sorry I would go on too long oh I'm sorry we couldn't get to your other question [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Humanities Festival

Views: 116,410

Rating: 4.9091806 out of 5

Keywords: chicago humanities festival, chf, humanities, chicago, festival, camille paglia, provocations, sex, love, sexual personae

Id: nvmTHQviAHM

Length: 55min 56sec (3356 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Backpusher]

Got it. It’s great. A morale-builder too in this intellectually cold, cruel world.