I’m talking about this new reclassification of people getting drunk, going on a date, going to fraternity houses, and women not taking responsibility for their own behavior. I said that gay men for thousands of years have been going out and having sex with strangers everywhere. They know they can be beaten up. They know they can be killed. What is this, where women are, “Oh, we must be protected against even our foolish choices. It’s up to men to.” This is ridiculous. This is an intrusion into the civil liberties of young people [to] have these vampiric parent figures and administrators hovering, watching, supervising people’s sex lives.
...in my point of view, no college administration should be taking any interest whatever in the social lives of the students. None! If a crime’s committed on campus, it should always be reported to the police. I absolutely do not agree with any committees investigating any charge of sexual assault. Either it’s a real crime, or it’s not a real crime. Get the hell out. So you get this expansion of the campus bureaucracy with this Stalinist oversight. But the students have been raised with helicopter parents. They want it.
Paglia on the 1950s:
the 1950s were a highly conformist period. Gender had repolarized after really great gains in the '20s and '30s. One must be more sympathetic to the situation of my parents' generation. They had known nothing but Depression and war throughout their entire lives. My father was a paratrooper; when he got out of the Army, everyone married. I'm the baby boom. They wanted normality. They just wanted to live like real people, man and wife in a home.
Paglia on feminism:
I am an equal opportunity feminist. I believe that all barriers to women's advancement in the social and political realm must be removed. However, I don't feel that gender is sufficient to explain all of human life. This gender myopia has become a disease, a substitute for a religion, this whole cosmic view. It's impossible that the feminist agenda can ever be the total explanation for human life. Our problem now is that this monomania—the identity politics of the 1970s, so people see everything through the lens of race, gender, or class-this is an absolute madness, and in fact, it's a distortion of the '60s. I feel that the '60s had a vision, a large cosmic perspective that was absolutely lost in this degeneration, in this splintering of the 1970s into these identity politics.
Paglia on American politics:
I think Americans are far more ingenious and open and daring. On the other hand...people abroad have a much more sophisticated idea about [politics and ideology in] Europe because they'll have 13 parties conflicting in parliament and so on. That's been a problem over here—it's either/or. You're either a liberal or a conservative. What?! You're combining things from both sides? Then obviously you're a traitor! It's become some sort of religion whether you're a Democrat or a Republican over here. And as you had the first conservative challenge coming from talk radio in the early '90s to the liberal hegemony in the mainstream media, I thought that was a very exciting period, because you start to get the clash of ideas. But now the right itself has become a victim of its own insularity, and I no longer feel that dialogue anymore.
...I have the sense—it's not an entirely comfortable one—that my students have slowly morphed away from even paying attention to politics over the past, let's say, 15 years. It's worried me, because the crises around the world are actually intensifying, and how are they going to cope as a generation?
...I'm just concerned if you're not interested at all in the news or in political sparring and maneuverings and so on, then how can you possibly have any influence on the future? I'm worried that we're heading toward a kind of Big Brother empire where you have the career politicians at the top in league with the puppet masters of the media, the ability to manage the news, the complete drop of journalistic standards now that the newspapers are vanishing. No young person reads a newspaper. That's on the way out.
Paglia on Hillary Clinton:
Hillary is a mess. And we're going to award the presidency to a woman who's enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary's record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It's a scandal! Anyone who believes in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between [Bill] Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He's a sex criminal! We're going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary's ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has made her own career. The woman failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose Law Firm was because her husband was a politician.
...She can't have an opinion without poll-testing it. She's a liar. This is not a strong candidate for our first woman president.
Paglia on the decadence of modern culture:
There [comes] a time when these fine gradations of gender identity—I'm a male trans doing this, etc.—this is a symbol of decadence, I'm sorry. Sexual Personae talks about this: That was in fact the inspiration for it, was that my overview of history and my noticing that in late phases, you all of a sudden get a proliferation of homosexuality, of sadomasochism, or gendered games, impersonations and masks, and so on. I think we're in a really kind of late phase of culture.Read more hereand here.
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