Paglia “… a festering hornet’s nest of aggression and overkill.”

The title of this post, quoted from her book “Sexual Personae” fairly accurately sums up the impression I gain from reading her verbose rants:

Paglia is full of shit.

Each paragraph of her writings is laced with classist, racist and sexist slurs, circular reasoning, straw men, and downright lies designed only to confabulate, obfuscate, insult, inflame and earn cheers from her frothing fascist fans.

Unfortunately, her talking points, recently amplified in an interview with highbrow fascist propagandist Jordan Peterson, are gaining a lot of traction in the neo-tantrik space. But they are mostly glib bluster, with little substance.

I read Paglia only because of the troubling impact her bitter spewings have had on the gender discourse. Her work doesn’t truly warrant a thorough analysis or critique… so below, I’m just shooting from the hip.

Paglia glorifies the 60s and the psychedelic-inspired awakening of creativity, yet didn’t have the balls to take LSD herself.

Similarly, she gorifies sexuality as gladiatorial combat, yet has no personal training or experience in the combat arts with which to ground her imaginal arena.

Galling Gender Essentialism

Paglia’s analytical method is a mess, and she commits basic errors that most second-year anthropology students would be embarrassed to submit in a term paper.

To infer fundamental universal human cognitive and cultural traits from a handful of European and US cultural icons cherry-picked from a vast historical, cultural and geographical terrain is arrogant, reductive, and colonial.

Rehabilitating Rape?

Paglia sees men as fundamentally sexually violent. She sees rape as the consequence of the failure of apollonic cultural structures to constrain this savage male sexuality. Yet with the same breath, she scoffs at societal attempts to punish subtle normalisation of sexual abuse. Instead, women should stop sending mixed signals, stop victimising men, and take charge of their own safety by becoming even more combative than men.

Projecting Sexual Trauma

Her understanding of sexuality as fundamentally violent may reflect personal experience of rape, though… she certainly speaks with the contracted, tense anxiety and toxic vindictiveness of someone whose trauma traps them in perpetual fight-mode. Her verbose analysis of eros conceals her deep disgust and terror of her own sexuality.

Her biological determinism is informed by her apparent general disgust with embodied experience, lacks nuance, and sets up a false binary with which she hastily and summarily dismisses the core arguments of constructivist reasoning.

Her admiration for the achievements of “Western civilisation” denies the ways in which European intellectual and cultural innovations were inspired by ideas pilfered from African and Oriental civilisations when Europeans were still organised in myriad illiterate warring chiefdoms. Its edifices were built by slaves, its industries fuelled by the rape of resources from its colonies.

Patriarchal Apologist

Paglia bends over willingly for a resurgent white supremacist patriarchy.

She allows the glib allure of her shallow misogynistic rhetoric to be weaponised to excuse and enable the violation of women, queer folk, indigenous people and minorities everywhere.

Perhaps the hurt little girl is delighted that daddy is finally satisfied?

#Paglia #Feminism #Fascism #Patriarchy