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Paglia, “Sexism Has Nothing to Do with It,” Salon.com column, February 11, 2016. “With Bernie Sanders’ thrilling, runaway victory over Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary, the old-guard feminist establishment in the U.S. has been dealt a crushing blow.”
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Paglia, Salon.com column, February 25, 2016. “Democrats face a stark choice this year. A vote for the scandal-plagued Hillary is a resounding ratification of business as usual—the corrupt marriage of big money and machine politics….What you also get with Hillary is a confused hawkish interventionism that has already dangerously destabilized North Africa and the Mideast. This is someone who declared her candidacy on April 12, 2015, via an email and slick video and then dragged her feet on making a formal statement of her presidential policies and goals until her pollsters had slapped together a crib list of what would push the right buttons. This isn’t leadership; it’s pandering.
“Thanks to several years of the Democratic Party establishment strong-arming younger candidates off the field for Hillary, the only agent for fundamental change remains Bernie Sanders, an honest and vanity-free man who has been faithful to his core progressive principles for his entire career. It is absolutely phenomenal that Sanders has made such progress nationally against his near-total blackout over the past year by the major media, including The New York Times….A vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against the machine, the obscenely money-mad and soulless juggernaut that the Democratic Party has become….
“The Sanders theme that is closest to my heart is his call for free public universities….The public education that I received at Harpur College during the 1960s (I appear to have been its first second-generation graduate) was superb, not simply for its excellent faculty and cultural programs but for its dynamic student body with a large constituency of passionately progressive Jews (like Bernie Sanders) from metropolitan New York City….The cost to my parents for my four years of college was amazingly minimal.
“It is an intolerable scandal that college costs, even at private universities, have been permitted to skyrocket in the U.S., burdening a generation of young adults with enormous debts for what in many cases are worthless degrees. The role played by the colleges themselves in luring applicants to take crippling unsecured loans has never received focused scrutiny. Perhaps a series of punitive, class-action lawsuits might wake the education industry up. Until the colleges themselves pay a penalty for their part in this institutionalized extortion, things are unlikely to change.”
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Paglia, Salon.com column, April 21, 2016. Responding to a question about Leonard Cohen from Prof. Lance Strate of Fordham University: “There can be no doubt about Cohen’s manifest intellect, emotional depth, and productivity. The problem for me is first, the labored, lugubrious monotony of his sepulchral singing style (I feel like I’m trapped with Morticia in a Charles Addams cartoon) and second, the painful over-calculation of his lyrics, which seem designed for the page rather than for performance. There’s no room for intuition, inspiration, ecstasy, surprise—every promising detail seems buried in rationalist preconception and plodding delivery.
“Leonard Cohen belongs to the Susan Sontag generation of existentialist Big Think—the drearier the better. Sontag’s zany brainstorm for cheering up the shell-shocked citizens of war-torn Sarajevo was to stage Waiting for Godot among the ruins. Cohen’s version of hip feels like a paralyzing, suffocating stasis. Would a few spoonfuls of syncopation kill him? He clings to words and doesn’t trust music. His verbal overkill parallels the convoluted preciosity of French post-structuralism (he was born in Quebec).
“ ‘Suzanne,’ of course, became a late-1960s counterculture classic, but it was because of Judy Collins’ gorgeous, luminous delivery, freed from Cohen’s heavy hand….My favorite Cohen song is ‘First We Take Manhattan’—I adore anything apocalyptic—but the best thing in it is the rippling Euro-disco beat, borrowed from the school of Giorgio Moroder, my idol.”
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Emily Hill, “ ‘The Woman Is a Disaster!’ Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton: A wide-ranging interview with the iconoclastic professor,” The Spectator (U.K.), October 29, 2016. [Paglia was in London for a talk on free speech with Claire Fox at the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican Centre, two weeks before the U.S. presidential election.] “Paglia says she has absolutely no idea how the election will go: ‘But people want change and they’re sick of the establishment….If Trump wins it will be an amazing moment of change because it would destroy the power structure of the Republican party, the power structure of the Democratic party, and destroy the power of the media.’ ”
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Matthew Campbell, interview, “ ‘Sociopath’ Hillary Scared Off Better Rivals,” The Sunday Times (U.K.), November 12, 2016. Paglia: “Any Democratic candidate other than Hillary Clinton would have beaten Donald Trump. Any other Democrat would have won this election because so many people voted for Trump just to stop the utterly sociopathic Hillary from gaining office. The problem is that no other candidate was allowed to run. It was undemocratic. And it was going on for years before the actual primary process as the Clintons crushed any possibility of a primary challenge to Hillary. All the best candidates in my party, the younger senators and mayors and governors in their early forties and fifties, did not dare to run. The party would not permit them to run.”
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Peter Lloyd and Erica Tempesta, “ ‘It’s Truly Tragic to See Her Maudlin Displays of Self-Pity’: Feminist Camille Paglia hits back at Madonna’s claims [at the Billboard Women in Music Awards] that she was rebuffed by her female peers at the start of her career,” The Daily Mail, December 13, 2016. Paglia: “I was Madonna’s first major defender, when she was still considered a pop tart and a sham puppet created by shadowy male producers….It is absolutely ridiculous for Madonna to now claim that she longed to ally with other women at the start of her career but was rebuffed from doing so. The media, in the U.S. and abroad, constantly asked Madonna about me or tried to bring us together, and she always refused….The real issue is that while Madonna’s world tours have remained highly successful, her artistic development has been stalled for 20 years….Madonna has become a prisoner of her own wealth and fame.”
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Paglia, “How to Age Disgracefully in Hollywood: The social critic and academic blames 1960s disruptions of gender roles (and not the entertainment industry) for Madonna’s and J.Lo’s difficulty in letting go of their youth as she chastises them to ‘stop cannibalizing the young,’ ” The Hollywood Reporter, January 13, 2017. “In December, at the Billboard Women in Music Awards in New York City, Madonna was given the trophy for Woman of the Year. In a rambling, tearful acceptance speech that ran more than 16 minutes, she claimed to be a victim of ‘blatant misogyny, sexism, constant bullying, and relentless abuse.’ It was a startling appropriation of stereotypical feminist rhetoric by a superstar whose major achievement in cultural history was to overthrow the puritanical old guard of second-wave feminism and to liberate the long-silenced pro-sex, pro-beauty wing of feminism, which (thanks to her) swept to victory in the 1990s….
“I was singled out by name as having accused her of ‘objectifying’ herself sexually (prudish feminist jargon that I have always rejected), when in fact I was Madonna’s first major defender, celebrating her revival of pagan eroticism and prophesying in a highly controversial 1990 New York Times op-ed that she was ‘the future of feminism.’ But I want to focus here on the charge of ageism that Madonna, now 58, leveled against the entertainment industry and that received heavy, sympathetic coverage in the mainstream media….
“If aging stars want to be taken seriously, they must find or recover a mature persona. Stop cannibalizing the young! Scrambling to stay relevant, Madonna is addicted to pointless provocations like her juvenile Instagrams or her trashy outfit with strapped-up bare buttocks and duct-taped nipples at the Metropolitan M
useum of Art Gala in May. She has forgotten the legacy of her great precursor, Marlene Dietrich, who retained her class and style to the end of her public life.
“In her Billboard Awards speech, Madonna oddly cited David Bowie as her ‘real muse.’ But Bowie did not cling to his revolutionary, gender-bending Ziggy Stardust in the way that Madonna doggedly regresses to the sassy street urchin of her 1980s debut. Bowie retired Ziggy after a single sensational year and evolved into other personae, such as the suave, enigmatic Thin White Duke. Neither Dietrich nor Bowie would have begun an event as Madonna did after Anderson Cooper handed her the Billboard trophy: ‘We already had sex with a banana’ and (about her microphone) ‘I always feel better with something hard between my legs.’
“Two years ago, Jennifer Lopez (then 45) made a similar misstep with her crudely repetitious, faux-porn “Booty” video with Iggy Azalea. At ABC’s recent New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show, Mariah Carey bungled more than her singing: in her needlessly risqué nude bodysuit, she looked like a splitting sack of over-ripe cantaloupes. All women performers should study the magnificent precedent of Lena Horne, a fiercely outspoken civil rights activist who maintained total dignity and gorgeous elegance over her 60-plus-year singing career. Today, graceful aging by veteran stars is wonderfully modeled by Jane Fonda, Sharon Stone, and Tippi Hedren, as well as the British actresses Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, and Charlotte Rampling. Lucy Liu, at 48, displays luminous self-possession and impeccable taste….
“Women in or out of Hollywood who dress like girls and erase all signs of aging are disempowering themselves and aggressing into territory that belongs to the young. They are surrendering their right of self-definition to others. Men are not the enemy: they, too, are subject to nature’s iron laws. For the sake of its own art, Hollywood needs less sex war, not more.” [Apropos Madonna’s strange confusion or senior moment at the Billboard Women in Music Awards, where she surreally conflated Paglia with the latter’s longtime bête noire Gloria Steinem, Paglia was philosophical: Madonna’s grasp of history has always been shaky at best.]
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Molly Fischer, “Camille Paglia: What the ’90s provocateur understands about the Trump era,” New York magazine, March 7, 2017. Asked about Donald Trump two weeks after Inauguration Day, Paglia (who voted for Jill Stein) says, “He is supported by half the country, hello! And also, this ethically indefensible excuse that all Trump voters are racist, sexist, misogynistic, and all that—American democracy cannot proceed like this, with this reviling half the country.” Paglia praises the “solidarity” of the Women’s March but says she was “horrified” by the pink pussy hats, which she calls “a major embarrassment to contemporary feminism”: “I want dignity and authority for women. My code is Amazonism. I want weapons.”
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Mitchell Sunderland, interview, “Camille Paglia Discusses Her War on ‘Elitist Garbage’ and Contemporary Feminism,” broadly.vice.com, March 14, 2017. Sunderland asks how young people can preserve free speech. Paglia replies: “Stand up, speak out, and refuse to be silenced! But identify the real source of oppression, which is embedded in the increasingly byzantine structure of higher education. Push back against the nanny-state college administrators who subject you to authoritarian surveillance and undemocratic thought control!…The rapid, uncontrolled spread of overpaid administrators on college campuses over the past 30 years has marginalized the faculty, downgraded education, and converted students into marketing tools. Administrators are locked in a mercenary commercial relationship with tuition-paying parents and in a coercive symbiosis with intrusive regulators of the federal government. Young people have been far too passive about the degree to which their lives are being controlled by commissars of social engineering who pay lip service to liberalism but who are at root Stalinist autocrats who despise and suppress individualism. There is no excuse whatever for the grotesque rise in tuition costs, which has bankrupted families and imposed crippling debt on students trying to start their lives. When will young people wake up to the connection between rampant student debt and the administrator-sanctioned suppression of free speech on campus? Follow the money—the yellow brick road leads to the new administrator master class.”
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Paglia, “A ‘Fractious’ Feminist Decries the Ruthless Thought Police Stifling Free Speech on Campus,” Time magazine, April 3, 2017. Cover: “Is Truth Dead?” Excerpt from Free Women, Free Men.
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Jonathan V. Last, interview, “Camille Paglia: On Trump, Democrats, transgenderism, and Islamist terror,” The Weekly Standard, June 15, 2017. Paglia: “My position continues to be that Hillary, with her supercilious, Marie Antoinette–style entitlement, was a disastrously wrong candidate for 2016 and that she secured the nomination only through overt chicanery by the Democratic National Committee, assisted by a corrupt national media who imposed a virtual blackout for over a year on potential primary rivals. Bernie Sanders had the populist passion, economic message, government record, and personal warmth to counter Trump. It was Sanders, for example, who addressed the crisis of crippling student debt, an issue that other candidates (including Hillary) then took up. Despite his history of embarrassing gaffes, the affable, plain-spoken Joe Biden, in my view, could also have defeated Trump, but he was blocked from running at literally the last moment by President Barack Obama, for reasons that the major media refused to explore….
“There seems to be a huge conceptual gap between Trump and his most implacable critics on the Left. Many highly educated, upper-middle-class Democrats regard themselves as exemplars of ‘compassion’ (which they have elevated into a supreme political principle) and yet they routinely assail Trump voters as ignorant, callous hate-mongers. These elite Democrats occupy an amorphous meta-realm of subjective emotion, theoretical abstractions, and refined language. But Trump is by trade a builder who deals in the tangible, obdurate, objective world of physical materials, geometry, and construction projects, where communication often reverts to the brusque, coarse, high-impact level of pre-modern working-class life, whose daily locus was the barnyard. It’s no accident that bourgeois Victorians of the industrial era tried to purge ‘barnyard language’ out of English.”
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“Rihanna Feels the Love,” cover story, Elle magazine, October 2017. Tributes from (among others) Venus Williams, Tyra Banks, Eminem, Wyclef Jean, Laverne Cox, Olivia Wilde, Pharrell Williams. Paglia: “Rihanna is today’s most fascinating performer, a mysterious amalgam of amiable warmth with glittering charisma. With her keen creative eye for line and color, she has become a fashion icon like Audrey Hepburn. Yet she is a tempestuous wild child and international adventuress like Ava Gardner. Most importantly, as an artist in this over-mechanized age, she bravely draws on deep wells of pure emotion, endearing her to millions of fans worldwide.”
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Interview, “Camille Paglia on Hugh Hefner’s Legacy, Trump’s Masculinity, and Feminism’s Sex Phobia,” The Hollywood Reporter, October 2, 2017 (after Hefner’s death). THR: “What would you say was Playboy’s cultural impact?” CP: “Hugh Hefner absolutely revolutionized the persona of the American male. In the post–World War Two era, men’s magazines were about hunting and fishing or the military, or they were like Esquire, erotic magazines with a kind of European flair. Hefner reimagined the American male as a connoisseur in the continental manner, a man who enjoyed all the fine pleasures of life, including sex. Hefner brilliantly put sex into a continuum of appreciative response to jazz, to art, to ideas, to fine food. This was something brand-new. Enjoying fine cuisine had always been considered unmanly in America. Hefner updated and revitalized the image of the British gentleman, a man of leisure who is deft at conversation—in which American men have never distinguished themselves—and the art of seduction, which was a sport refined by the French. Hefner’s new vision of American masculinity was part of his desperate revision of his own Puritan heritage. On his father’s side, he descended directly from Willi
am Bradford, who came over on the Mayflower and was governor of Plymouth Colony, the major settlement of New England Puritans….”
THR: “What do you think about the fact that Trump’s childhood hero and model of sophisticated American masculinity was Hefner?” CP: “Before the election, I kept pointing out that the mainstream media based in Manhattan, particularly The New York Times, was hopelessly off in the way it was simplistically viewing Trump as a classic troglodyte misogynist. I certainly saw in Trump the entire Playboy aesthetic, including the glitzy world of casinos and beauty pageants. It’s a long passé world of confident male privilege that preceded the birth of second-wave feminism. There is no doubt that Trump strongly identified with it as he was growing up. It seems to be truly his world-view. But it is categorically not a world of unwilling women. Nor is it driven by masculine abuse. It’s a world of show girls, of flamboyant femaleness, a certain kind of strutting style that has its own intoxicating sexual allure—which most young people attending elite colleges today have no contact with whatever….”
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