Monday 2 September 2019

"[Camille] Paglia laments that the 'antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism is back.' She calls it 'victim feminism' and complains that 'everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood. Everyone is made to cater to it—'in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.'" #QotD


"[Camille] Paglia laments that the 'antisex and repressively doctrinaire side of feminism is back again—big!' She calls it 'victim feminism' and complains that 'everything we’d won in the 1990s has been totally swept away. Now we have this endless privileging of victimhood, with a pathological vulnerability seen as the default human mode.'  Everyone is made to cater to it—'in the workplace, in universities, in the demand for safe spaces.'
    "As a teacher of undergraduates, Ms. Paglia despairs at how 'bad it is for young people, filled with fears, to be raised in this kind of a climate where personal responsibility isn’t spoken of.' Since her own youth, she says, college students have devolved from rebels into skittish supplicants, petitioning people in authority to protect them from real life...
    “ 'Our parents were the World War II generation,' Ms. Paglia says, 'so they had a sense of reality about life.' Children now 'are raised in a far more affluent period. Even people without much money have cellphones, televisions, access to cars. They’re raised in an air-conditioned environment. I can still remember when there was no air-conditioning.' She shudders as she sips her cold beer, adding that she suffered horribly in the heat.
“ 'Everything is so easy now,' Ms. Paglia continues. 'The stores are so plentifully supplied. You just go in and buy fruits and vegetables from all over the world.' Undergrads, who’ve studied neither economics nor history, 'have a sense that this is the way life has always been. Because they’ve never been exposed to history, they have no idea that these are recent attainments that come from a very specific economic system.'
    "Capitalism, she continues, has 'produced this cornucopia around us. But the young seem to believe in having the government run everything, and that the private companies that are doing things for profit around them, and supplying them with goods, will somehow exist forever.' ... 'capitalism has produced the glorious emancipation of women.'” 
          ~ Camille Paglia, from the article 'A Feminist Capitalist Professor Under Fire'
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1 comment:

MarkT said...

Of course the seeds for the feminism of today lay in the same feminism that Paglia supported in the 1990's. Despite that, credit to her for eventually recognizing a something's gone wrong and calling it out.