A Few Words from Camille Paglia

What the world needs now is more Camille Paglia. Among academics Paglia has always stood out for her fierce integrity. She tends to lean left, but she does her own work and draws her own conclusions. She avoids party line thinking, on all matters. But especially on matters that are near and dear to the feminist  matriarchy.

Recently interviewed by Claire Lehmann, Paglia offers her views on a variety of topics, among them #MeToo:

The headlong rush to judgment by so many well-educated, middle-class women in the #MeToo movement has been startling and dismaying. Their elevation of emotion and group solidarity over fact and logic has resurrected damaging stereotypes of women’s irrationality that were once used to deny us the vote. I found the blanket credulity given to women accusers during the recent U.S. Senate confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh positively unnerving: it was the first time since college that I truly understood the sexist design of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, whose mob of vengeful Furies is superseded by formal courts of law, where evidence is weighed.

Yes, indeed, women showing themselves to be emotionally unhinged does not do the cause much good. As many have noticed, the Kavanaugh hearings were a death knell to #MeToo. We have fought long and hard to stop summary justice, as in lynchings. Now we got to see Congressional Democrats and their allies try to destroy a man and his wife and his daughters because they were afraid to lose their right to abortion.

Paglia explains her view:

I am wholeheartedly in favor of women students or employees knowing their rights and speaking up to defend them. However, the #MeToo movement has gone seriously off track in encouraging uncorroborated accusations dating from ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. No democracy can survive in such a paranoid climate of ambush and summary execution. This is Stalinism, a nadir of politics.

And, she expresses some serious doubts about today’s expectations for men and women, as well as about the new sex roles. She suggests that today’s women are expecting from men what they used to find in other women. Evidently, it’s a bad formula:

Wives returning from work to an apartment or house are expecting their husbands to fulfill all the emotional and conversational needs that were once fulfilled by other women of multiple generations throughout the agrarian workday in the fields or at home (where the burdens of childcare and eldercare were group shared).

Apparently, feminism has not been a great success. Middle class women, Paglia observes, are consumed with resentment toward men. Among the problems, destigmatizing divorce has produced more divorces. Feminists considered it liberating. Divorced women found themselves competing for men against younger women:

What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced. With divorce so easy since the sexual revolution, women find themselves competing with younger women in new and cruel ways.

Thus, the sexual revolution has failed women, but I think it fair to add that feminism has failed them too.

Paglia concludes:

In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world.