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[intaglio]

A killer review of Camille Paglia from Molly Ivins

[Tuesday Afternoon]

1. another four paragraph excerpt -

inre: the two kinds of people statement ---

You think perhaps this is a cheap shot, that I have searched her work and caught Ms. Paglia in a rare moment of sweeping generalization, easy to make fun of? Au contraire, as we always say in Amarillo; the sweeping generalization is her signature. In fact, her work consists of damn little else. She is the queen of the categorical statement.

Never one to dodge a simple dichotomy when she can set one up, Ms. Paglia holds that the entire error of western civilization stems from denying that nature is a kind of nasty, funky, violent, wet dream, and that Judeo-Christianity has been one long effort to ignore this. She pegs poor old Rousseau, that fathead, as the initiator of the silly notion that nature is benign and glorious and that only civilization corrupts.

Right away, I got a problem. Happens I have spent a lot of my life in the wilderness, and also a lot of my life in bars. When I want sex and violence, I go to a Texas honky-tonk. When I want peace and quiet, I head for the woods. Just as a minor historical correction to Ms. Paglia, Rousseau did not invent the concept of benign Nature. Among the first writers to hold that nature was a more salubrious environment from man than the corruptions of civilization were the Roman Stoics — rather a clear-eyed lot, I always thought.

<snip>

Bram Dijkstra, author of a much-praised book, Idols of Perversity, which is a sort of mirror image of Sexual Personae, said that Paglia “literally drags the whole nineteenth-century ideological structure back into the late-eighteenth century, really completely unchanged. What’s so amazing is that she takes all that nineteenth-century stuff, Darwinism and social Darwinism, and she re-asserts it and reaffirms it in this incredibly dualistic fashion. In any situation, she establishes the lowest common denominator of a point. She says, `This is the feminist point of view,’ and overturns it by standing it on its head. She doesn’t go outside what she critiques; she simply puts out the opposite of it.”

[greatlaurel]

2. Molly Ivins was a brilliant writer. Her death was a tremendous loss for us all.

Thanks for posting this.

Found the link to Molly Ivins takedown of Paglia over at Pharyngula

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/09/25/ivins-v-paglia/#more-20775

You might enjoy the comments there.

[sufrommich]

3. What a great blog to be introduced to,added to my favorites.

Paglia is the crowned queen of useful idiots for the anti feminist crowd and leave it to Molly Ivins to so eloquently point that out (god I miss her) loved the comments under the article and whoever thought of the user name "Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden" I salute you.

[seabeyond]

4. i must have posted a reply on the link. i wanted it here. too lazy to bring it over. thank you

for posting this. i love the woman. of course she is right on.

as i said in the other post, we use to combat the anti's with this woman. now the woman is so far out there, in rw, we pretty much do not have to do that battle any more.