interview with Paglia

A lot of good stuff early in this essay, on a provocative (liberal) thinker, Camille Paglia. I'll post three Paglia quotes and then two excerpts from the article's author. The third quote got the transgender-identifying lesbian in some hot water. But thankfully, her university is run by liberals committed to free speech and thought.

-“If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.”

-“There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.”

-It is “ridiculous that any university ever tolerated a complaint of a girl coming in six months or a year after an event. If a real rape was committed, go frigging report it to the police."

-The word “person” captures a concept so fundamental to Westerners that it can be jarring to discover that it once had a different meaning. Etymologically, “person” comes from the Latin word persona, which means “mask.” To be a person is to wear a mask, act out a role—what people today might call being fake.

Looking back, Paglia saw that her grandmothers had their own sphere of power at home, separate from the male sphere—where older women ruled. “Young women were nothing” in that world, Paglia said. Today, it’s the opposite: women try to gain power in the male sphere of work and lose status culturally as they age...Her childhood also instilled in her an appreciation of men, especially working-class men—the plumbers, factory workers, and policemen who keep the world going...“One of the reasons I’m not anti-male,” Paglia told me, “is because I saw the sacrifices made by my father’s generation in those men.”