[Julie Steiner]

Originally Posted by Andrew Frisardi

Camille Paglia [...] And of course she herself identifies as transgender, so she's not even remotely transphobic.

Ooooh. I'm not so charitable about Camille Paglia.

Paglia claims she has never identified as a woman, yet her own preferred pronoun happens to be "she"--the same one she was assigned at birth. I would be fine with her choice to remain with her cis-pronoun, if she didn't go out of her way to ridicule the vast, vast majority of transgender people who choose otherwise.

That looks pretty belligerently, bullyingly transphobic, from where I'm standing.

And that also looks also pretty consistent with Paglia's belligerent, bullying attitude toward everyone who does not make the choices she herself would make--including the many, many women who spend time thinking it over before reporting a date rape. Just because Paglia can't imagine herself not reporting it immediately, were she ever in that situation, she mocks those date rape victims who do hesitate before putting themselves through the ordeal of a humiliating police investigation and character assassination, with very little chance of justice at the end of it.

Paglia thinks empathy is imagining what SHE, with her own strengths and weaknesses, would do in a given situation. But empathy is actually imagining yourself as SOMEONE ELSE, with THEIR strengths and weaknesses, in a given situation. Whenever those two choices differ, Paglia condemns the other person as wrong and stupid and undeserving of any pity whatsoever, because they have committed the unforgivable sin of not being Camille Paglia.

[Susan McLean]

I second Julie's opinion of Paglia.

Susan

[Andrew Frisardi]

I like her. She is a provocateur, who overstates and exaggerates in order to defy collective assumptions, especially academic ones.

Admittedly, any provocateur can sometimes just be an asshole, but I think Paglia's voice has been overall salutary since she first rocked the boat in the 1990s.

[Julie Steiner]

Andrew, I might appreciate Paglia's provocateurism if she didn't spend so much time provoking underdogs, such as rape survivors and trans people. Do rape survivors and trans people and their allies really need provocation more than the powerful and privileged do?

Then, after she has kicked these underdogs enough to make sure that they and their allies will band together against her, she portrays herself as a hero, bravely and nobly facing down a pack of vicious wolves: alas, she cries, for the state of affairs in modern universities, whatever happened to academic freedom and free speech, political correctness is sooooooo out of control, blah blah blah.

I've got zero patience for people who mercilessly blame vulnerable people for their own troubles, but who then feel perfectly entitled to expect sympathy themselves, when they play the victim in situations of their own making. A troll with pretty much the same M.O. of whining about the disrespectful attention he reaps after sowing his own outrageously insensitive and insulting statements is now in the White House. Ugh. I didn't like Paglia long before I didn't like Trump, and I'm not growing any fonder of her.

Speaking of Paglia's position on pronoun preferences (and returning to the article at the top of this thread), I had to snort at the article-writer's apparent contention that society's failure to be as obstinate as himself about saying "he/his/him" (against someone's stated wishes otherwise) was a major reason for the breakup of an otherwise completely happy and stable household.

[John Isbell]

Kicking an underdog is never a very pleasant spectacle. There's a good British article on Trump that argues this is something many people in the UK despise him for. But I guess that's true in America as well.

Cheers,
John

[Andrew Frisardi]

Julie, I agree that Paglia milks controversy, and I also feel uneasy with some of her provocations.

But I don’t see the dynamics of all her provocateurism in the same way. Not everything she says is aimed at an underdog. For example, in the ’90s she challenged hypocritical and puritanical attitudes attitudes toward sex in a certain kind of feminism. That struck me as positive.

Is she a drama queen? Sure. But she also pokes holes in an illusion of ideological consensus, again especially in academia. The fact that she pisses off both the left and the right is part of that.

And yes, the FT article is asinine on the point you mention (about calling McCloskey “she”). I see the FT article as more narrow and trite than “hateful,” but there is a meanness to it too.

[Jim Moonan]

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Aaron: "There is no affluent Left."

Andrew: "Forgive me Bud but to me the extreme Left would be people actually living out the practice of our beliefs such as (for the most part) the Zapatistas, Kurds in Rojava, or any number of isolated collectives spread across the globe. I find that most people use the term extreme Left to refer to mariginalized violent idiot-Americans disconnected from any meaningful commune or association or some ahistorical pawing at the State-worshipping scum that ran the murders in Russia and China. So you might have to clarify what the extreme Left is and what it demands. If you are talking about the reluctant acceptance of violence in the thoughtful subsets of Antifa or the Earth First-ish scenes then all I can say is that I see no difference between them and any action of self-defense faced with no other viable outlets."

(I’m sorry I said that. I really should stay sidelined in these conversations. I don’t know enough. I was speaking off the top of my head... My bad.)
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