Camille Paglia - Sex, Art and American Culture

basesurge's Full Review: Camille Paglia - Sex, Art, and American Culture: E... | The best one-liner description of Camille Paglia I've heard is "contrarian feminist". That's really inadequate, "contratian" tends to imply someone who takes a contrary view for the shear delight of being contrary. Well, it'll have to do for now. Let's talk about feminism for a second. Most people these days don't consider the term "feminist" to be a cuss word. Feminism has become synonymous with "fairness". But there are really two kinds of feminism. The first kind everybody knows about. It's the kind of feminism that proposes that women should be permitted to own property, be free from beatings and sexual assault by their husbands. It maintains that Jane the Bank Teller and Jim the Bank Teller, given equal experience and performance should receive the same pay scale. Everybody this side of Fallujah can get behind this sort of feminism. Call it "Equity Feminism." Now the other sort, it's been called "Gender Feminism." Gender Feminism is a different bird altogether. Where the equity sort of feminism is often concerned with gritty realities of life, pay, safety, money, etc., it's academic sister interests itself in more rarefied issues. Practitioners of this sort of feminism tend to be members of academia or the news and commentary media. These people are generally well-educated, over-educated truth be told, and are wallow in the politics and philosophy of the academic Left. They're frequently female and often lesbian. They're wordy followers of Marx and the Three Stooges of French Post-Modernist "thought": Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Their idea of art is Andres Serrano's "Pi@@ Christ" and Chris Ofili's elephant dung/Virgin Mary masterwork. They talk about sex incessantly but understand it not, they try to lasso it with a rope fashioned out of gassy political rhetoric. (To anybody who thinks that "sex is a political act", I refer you to the Mary Matalin/James