{"id":36203,"date":"2016-10-30T02:00:43","date_gmt":"2016-10-30T06:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=36203"},"modified":"2019-05-19T11:51:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-19T15:51:48","slug":"victorian-style-feminism-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/10\/30\/victorian-style-feminism-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Victorian-style feminism today"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recent interview with Camille Paglia<\/a> in the Spectator<\/em> included a blast at the direction modern feminism has taken:<\/p>\n

Paglia\u2019s feminism has always been concerned with issues far beyond her own navel and the Hillary verdict is typical of her attitude \u2014 which is more in touch with women in the real world than most feminists\u2019 (a majority of Americans, for example, have an \u2018unfavourable view of Hillary Clinton\u2019 according to recent polling).<\/p>\n

\u2018My philosophy of feminism,\u2019 the New York-born 69-year-old explains, \u2018I call street-smart Amazon feminism. I\u2019m from an immigrant family. The way I was brought up was: the world is a dangerous place; you must learn to defend yourself. You can\u2019t be a fool. You have to stay alert.\u2019 Today, she suggests, middle-class girls are being reared in a precisely contrary fashion: cosseted, indulged and protected from every evil, they become helpless victims when confronted by adversity. \u2018We are rocketing backwards here to the Victorian period with this belief that women are not capable of making decisions on their own. This is not feminism \u2014 which is to achieve independent thought and action. There will never be equality of the sexes if we think that women are so handicapped they can\u2019t look after themselves.\u2019<\/p>\n

Paglia traces the roots of this belief system to American campus culture and the cult of women\u2019s studies. This \u2018poison\u2019 \u2014 as she calls it \u2014 has spread worldwide. \u2018In London, you now have this plague of female journalists\u2026 who don\u2019t seem to have made a deep study of anything\u2026\u2019<\/p>\n

Paglia does not sleep with men \u2014 but she is, very refreshingly, in favour of them. She never moans about \u2018the patriarchy\u2019 but freely asserts that manmade capitalism has enabled her to write her books.<\/p>\n

As for male\/female relations, she says that they are far more complex than most feminists insist. \u2018I wrote a date-rape essay in 1991 in which I called for women to stand up for themselves and learn how to handle men. But now you have this shibboleth, \u201cNo means no.\u201d Well, no. Sometimes \u201cNo\u201d means \u201cNot yet\u201d. Sometimes \u201cNo\u201d means \u201cToo soon\u201d. Sometimes \u201cNo\u201d means \u201cKeep trying and maybe yes\u201d. You can see it with the pigeons on the grass. The male pursues the female and she turns away, and turns away, and he looks a fool but he keeps on pursuing her. And maybe she\u2019s testing his persistence; the strength of his genes\u2026 It\u2019s a pattern in the animal kingdom \u2014 a courtship pattern\u2026\u2019 But for pointing such things out, Paglia adds, she has been \u2018defamed, attacked and viciously maligned\u2019 \u2014 so, no, she is not in the least surprised that wolf-whistling has now been designated a hate crime in Birmingham.<\/p>\n

Girls would be far better advised to revert to the brave feminist approach of her generation \u2014 when women were encouraged to fight all their battles by themselves, and win. \u2018Germaine Greer was once in this famous debate with Norman Mailer at Town Hall. Mailer was formidable, enormously famous \u2014 powerful. And she just laid into him: \u201cI was expecting a hard, nuggety sort of man and he was positively blousy\u2026\u201d Now that shows a power of speech that cuts men up. And this is the way women should be dealing with men \u2014 finding their weaknesses and susceptibilities\u2026 not bringing in an army of pseudo, proxy parents to put them down for you so you can preserve your perfect girliness.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent interview with Camille Paglia in the Spectator included a blast at the direction modern feminism has taken: Paglia\u2019s feminism has always been concerned with issues far beyond her own navel and the Hillary verdict is typical of her attitude \u2014 which is more in touch with women in the real world than most […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[1288,987,764,43],"class_list":["post-36203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-camillepaglia","tag-feminism","tag-university","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-9pV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":36204,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36203\/revisions\/36204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}