Camille Paglia - still not pulling any punches

I've always had time for Camille Paglia despite disagreeing with her on a number of issues and Bari Weiss' interview with her in the Wall Street Journal confirms my opinion.  She may be nuts and occasionally contradictory but in the main her views on men, women and feminism are spot on. 

Basically she doesn't say anything that a normal person doesn't know instinctively to be true.  Men and women are different.  Education is being feminised. Women who dress publicly in a sexually provocative way are not taking care of their own safety.   Feminism has impugned the legitimate choice that many women would prefer, i.e. to stay at home with their own kids.  Abortion shouldn't be the central issue for feminists.

Camille argues that feminism should go back to basics.  Offering equal opportunity to women and the freedom to take those opportunities or not.  The fights we should be having are about rapes on Indian buses; honour killings and female genital mutilation.

All absolutely true however these are hard fights to have for they fly in the face of the current view that all cultures are equal.  It is difficult to come out and say honour killings are evil, dishonourable and wrong and any culture that condones such a thing is backward and evil.  Guess that's why the feminist establishment have been so deafeningly silent on these issues.  Much easier to cry "Mysogynist!" when a man wears a blue tie or looks at his watch or has a family or something.

The Fighting Feminazis

It's always amusing to watch the feminists going hammer and tongs and Jessica Rudd's piece in Australian Vogue is a typical example.  Since Naomi Wolf  wrote the Beauty Myth the old guard have been looking at young women and found them wanting.  While the younger feminists wail back, "You don't understand us."
Of course the old feminists understand only too well.  They understand that they have failed.  Western women are exactly where they would be if there had been no feminist movement. 

Ms Rudd is thankful that she doesn't have to put up with
  the grubby office come-ons daily on Mad Men
but are the grubby office come-ons worse than the abuse doled out by Malcolm Tucker from The Thick of It.  Progress.  Both Mad Men and The Thick of It are fiction, in the real world the come-ons still continue, though maybe less grubbily to avoid being sued. 

In the real world women would have made the inroads that they have made without feminism.  Labour saving inventions have meant that "men's" work no longer needs the strength of men.  Most jobs are white collar and can be done equally well by women.  Women were already being educated, hence all those women already in university starting up the women's movement.  Women were entering the workforce because they needed to.  Women have always worked outside the home.  Only women of a certain class have had the luxury of not needing paid employment.  That is still true today.  All feminism did was make these women feel guilty for taking this option.

The other innovation that freed women was the pill.  The pill was not a feminist invention.  It did however put women in charge of their reproductive capabilities.  They could choose, to a greater degree when and if they would have children.   Those old feminists must be shaking their heads in horror at the number of teenagers choosing to be unmarried mums.  Progress.

These things pushed women into the workplace and sheer numbers would have pushed them up the ladder anyway.  There was no need for feminism and the fact that young successful women who have had all the so called feminist advantages still choose to dress sexily rather that comfortably, to get married and look after their children rather than climb the corporate ladder shows that the paradigm that feminism was trying to dismantle still exists and therefore those old feminists failed. No wonder they're disappointed.

By way of disclosure, I am disqualified from being a feminist on the grounds of my conservatism.  This makes me a dispassionate observer.