A Conversation with Camille Paglia -- Conversations with Tyler -- Medium

A Conversation with Camille Paglia -- Conversations with Tyler -- Medium

She's not a conservative, but....

"[Brazilians] also understand nature, the grandeur of nature, the power of nature. It's much larger.... Yes, instead of these silly little arguments that, 'Oh, climate change is causing the end of the world.' Oh my God. Anyone who talks like that does not understand the grandeur and the power of nature. To imagine that we can make a change in it is so absolutely absurd."

"I really have not been following the Stones. Ever since Bill Wyman left the Stones, I have not felt that this was the Stones I knew. I'm delighted that they go on, and that they perform, and so on, but I have absolutely no interest in exposing myself to those horrible arena conditions for music. Oh my goodness, just the light shows and the this and the that. They're not musical experiences. They're social experiences now."

"Right now, our primary school education is absolutely appalling in its lack of world history and world geography. I know because I get everyone in my classroom. I'm lucky I teach at a kind of school where I'm getting students from a wide range of preparation.... It is unbelievable how little they know. It is absolutely shocking how little they know. This is a recipe for a disaster."

"This other thing of the online thing, I don't believe this online thing at all. I think that you need a live person, and you need a live person who can talk extemporaneously and respond to the moment. Not just people who are reading the same old damn lecture over and over again."

"Obviously, we're in a time now where parenting is in crisis, I would think. The reason we have all these whiny, super sensitive girls on campus that'll run shrieking at the slightest thing that offends their ears or drag mattresses onto the stage at commencement exercises, the reason we have that is because the parents have not prepared them for real life. In other words, they've been raised in this bourgeois, pampered cocoon, so I think there's been a tremendous failure of parenting, certainly, in terms of young people being ready to take on the real world in their late teens."

"The problem right now is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture. We're in a period now where young people are being processed for the universities, and the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There's no nothing in the body -- .... Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There's absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men. That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. That's what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. We're all genderless mannequins."

"By the time second-wave feminism revived, which was with Betty Friedan's cofounding of NOW in 1967, I was out of sync with them. When suddenly they revived, began complaining about men, and all that stuff, so on and so forth, I hated it. It was early clashes that I had with those feminists from the start. I tried to join second-wave feminism. They wouldn't have me because I would not bad mouth men. These women, like Amelia Earhart, they did not bad mouth men. They admired men. They admired what men had done. What they said was, 'We demand equal opportunity for women,' which gave us the opportunity to show that we can achieve at the same level as men who did all these great things."

"[Women's Studies profs at SUNY Albany] deny that hormones have the slightest impact on human life. They said hormones don't even exist. They told me I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe -- these are women who are in the English department. Wonderful education they had in biology."

"I'm just trying to inspire graduate students to rebel against this horrible fascism that forces theory onto them before they expose themselves to everything that's wonderful and imaginative in the history of literature and art. I believe that paying minute attention to the actual work itself is the mission of criticism. I am hopelessly old-fashioned. Because that's not what you're supposed to do. You're supposed to mention Foucault 59 times in one paragraph, et cetera."

"I'm always in touch with the janitors, infrastructure, condition of the buildings. I deal with everyday life. I'm not treated like a queen. I'm just like an ordinary schoolmarm working like a horse, pulling the plow. I think that's a really good idea for writers is to have a job where you're dealing with constant frustrations, and problems, and so on. I think that's really good for you."

"Get a job. Have a job. Again, that's the real job. Every time you have frustrations with the real job, you say, 'This is good.' This is good, because this is reality. This is reality as everybody lives it. This thing of withdrawing from the world to be a writer, I think, is a terrible mistake. Number one thing is constantly observing. My whole life, I'm constantly jotting things down. Constantly. Just jot, jot, jot, jot. I'll have an idea. I'm cooking, and I have an idea, 'Whoa, whoa.' I have a lot of pieces of paper with tomato sauce on them or whatever. I transfer these to cards or I transfer them to notes."

"There's all this propaganda being pumped out about this issue, when in fact, women are not -- if women are earning 72 cents or 75 cents on the dollar, it's not for the same job.... This is the lie that's being told.... What it is, is overall, the averages of women, of their own volition, for whatever reasons, are taking jobs that have more flexibility as opposed to the around-the-clock, seven days a week, night thing. For example, women tend to shy away from commission sales jobs where they're on the road a lot, and that is where a lot of men have very high earnings. Women are making choices, and they would prefer to be closer to their children, so yes. These disparities are ultimately based in biological differences."