Wall Street Journal What you're seeing is how a civilization
commits suicide," says
Camille Paglia.
This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling
anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her
indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is
out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male
students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and
women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our
three-hour conversation.
When Ms.
Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the
publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a
feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic
to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and
Decadence From Nefertiti to
Emily Dickinson,
" and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in
female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts." [...]
But no subject gets her going more than when
I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to
paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the
collapse of Western civilization.
She
starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The
entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them
have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no
prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she
says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this
illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically
kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too.
They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."
The
results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in
Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and
construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how
vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says,
referring to women who wear sexy clothes. [...]
update December 30, 2013 - Ploni added important clarifications that I put in the comments section