Paglia rips the Academy a new one

Ouroboros said:

I'll take a shot at answering the question you put to the OP.

While I don't think her "map metaphor" works very well, one of her later paragraphs in the interview states:





Now what that says to me is that she wants people to embrace her paradigm in which it's commonly believed that men and women are fundamentally different and that they aren't necessarily made happy by the same things, especially by things like the workplace, whose satisfactions are not even that great for many men.

This is completely at odds with the reigning Marxist "sex differences are created by social forces only," and I'm not sure what if any politicians would go against this falsehood. I can't see any prominent Leftists breaking ranks to champion Paglia's views, and prominent Rightists would hesitate to endorse anything that would give the Left something new to attack.

Basically, she wants to redraw the conceptual "map" by which current society renders the genders of male and female. I don't know her position on transgender matters but I surmise from her books that she finds the polarity of "sis-male" and "sis-female" paramount to her critical system.

Click to expand...

I appreciate your attempting to answer the question -- AFAIK, the OP-er hasn't at all -- I posed to the OP-er; however, your remarks speak to what you think Paglia would say in answer to my question, not what, -- provided you, like the OP-er, agree with Paglia's thesis -- would be your own redrawing of the cultural map and the cultural landscape it describes?

Paglia's essay asserts as extant age-old and persistent cultural discord/inequity that dissatisfies/disserves not only women, but also, she says, men. The OP-er concurred with her, which is what it is; however, what Paglia stopped short of identifying what be the new mores and practices that society should adopt and how to bring to fruition those two things. That's what I've asked the OP-er to share with us because, well, (1) I read Paglia's essay, so I don't need it interpreted ("book reported") for me, and (2) that I know the OP-er agrees with what Paglia has written in the noted essay is essentially useless information -- "So what? The OP-er agrees with (thinks well said) Paglia's thesis. Big deal. Now what?"...I don't know the OP-er and s/he doesn't know me. The OP-er agrees; that's a point of fact and I'm not going to refute it. I think there may be some value to learning what ideas the OP-er has that build on Paglia's ideas. That's why I asked the question I did.

Well Xelor, if we're going to dice things very precisely, then I haven't seen Hawkeye10 address total agreement with the entire essay, only with the section he excerpted. He may or may not agree with the whole, but from this thread the only thing we know he agrees with is Paglia's verdict on the state of the American universities.

If you want to fault Paglia for not having a grand plan to re-orient society along the lines she advocates, I guess you're on solid ground. She's not a politician, so all she as a literary critic can do is say, "I wish society was more like X." Maybe some individuals listen to her, while others don't, just like most of our other scholars and thinkers. Given some of the consequences of the "grand planners" in recent centuries, though, we may be better off with fewer of those.