Camille Paglia: How Bill Clinton is like Bill Cosby

[Commie College]

Camille Paglia, the political and cultural critic, has been a
brave and brilliant provocateur on Salon for almost 20 years
now. Paglia seemed to be on the winning side of the wars over
feminism and political correctness in the 1990s, but recently
those battles have been reopened. Suddenly we’re talking again
and in very different ways about sexual culture on campus.
Comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Maher talk about the
return of a stifling political correctness. And we’re staring at
the potential rematch of a Clinton and a Bush.

There were so many stories that we wanted Paglia’s take on: Bill
Cosby, Donald Trump, the state of the Democratic Party. So we
spent two hours discussing all of them on Monday, and we’ll
present her thoughts over the next three days. Stand back:
Paglia does not hold back on anything.

Over the next two days, she’ll hold forth on the GOP
presidential field in devastating ways, and offer surprising
thoughts on how she thinks Clinton vs Sanders will end. We start
today with thoughts on Bill Cosby, Bill Clinton, campus
political correctness and modern feminism.

The banner on the Drudge Report this morning is that Kathleen
Willey is starting a site to collect harassment claims against
Bill Clinton. New York magazine, meanwhile, has the stories of
35 women who say they were raped or assaulted by Bill Cosby. I
wonder if you see a connection between the two stories: Would
Bill Clinton’s exploits be viewed more like Cosby’s if he was in
the White House now, instead of in the 1990s?

Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby scandal surfaced, I
knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary’s campaign,
because young women today have a much lower threshold for
tolerance of these matters. The horrible truth is that the
feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did
in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior
because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and
administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it
didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.

But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women
have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient
history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will.
And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a
serial abuser of working-class women–he had exploited that power
differential even in Arkansas. And then in the case of Monica
Lewinsky–I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and
company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist
history! What bigger power differential could there be than
between the president of the United States and this poor
innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a
kind of pleading, open look to her–somebody who was looking for
a father figure.

I was enraged! My publicly stated opinion at the time was that
I don’t care what public figures do in their private life. It’s
a very sophisticated style among the French, and generally in
Europe, where the heads of state tend to have mistresses on the
side. So what? That doesn’t bother me at all! But the point is,
they are sophisticated affairs that the European politicians
have, while the Clinton episode was a disgrace.

A cigar and the intern is certainly the opposite of
sophisticated.

Absolutely! It was frat house stuff! And Monica got nothing out
of it. Bill Clinton used her. Hillary was away or inattentive,
and he used Monica in the White House–and in the suite of the
Oval Office, of all places. He couldn’t have taken her on some
fancy trip? She never got the perks of being a mistress; she was
there solely to service him. And her life was completely
destroyed by the publicity that followed. The Clinton’s are
responsible for the destruction of Monica Lewinsky! They
probably hoped that she would just go on and have a job, get
married, have children, and disappear, but instead she’s like
this walking ghoul.

Fifteen years later, that’s still the sad role left for her to
play.

Yes, it’s like something out of “Wuthering Heights” or “Great
Expectations”–some Victorian novel, where a woman turns into
this mourning widow who mopes on and on over a man who abused or
abandoned her. Hillary has a lot to answer for, because she
took an antagonistic and demeaning position toward her husband’s
accusers. So it’s hard for me to understand how the generation
of Lena Dunham would or could tolerate the actual facts of
Hillary’s history.

So have the times and standards changed enough that Clinton
would be seen as Cosby, if he was president today?

Oh, yes! There’s absolutely no doubt, especially in this age of
instant social media. In most of these cases, like the Bill
Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect
of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any
questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human
motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional
needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has
been politicized–“Don’t ask any questions!” “No discussion!”
“Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!” And thus in this period
of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become
dull. There’s nothing interesting being written–in fiction or
plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to
ask psychological questions.

So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill
Clinton–aside from their initials! Young feminists need to
understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies
their sense that female power is much bigger than they are!
These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally
infantile–they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has
something to do with their early sense of being smothered by
female power–and this pathetic, abusive and criminal behavior is
the result of their sense of inadequacy.

Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my
first book, “Sexual Personae”–which of course is far too complex
for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex
because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life.
Everything is not black and white, for heaven’s sake! We are
formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood.
That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was
involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he
went out and did these awful things to assert his own
independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert.
He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac–a
style that was popular in the late Victorian period in the
nineteenth-century.

It’s hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses
from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their
beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s
happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to
make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for
me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And
this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity
orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying
unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea
why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young
woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s
necrophilia–this fear and envy of a woman’s power.

And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer,
you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother.
He felt smothered by her in some way. But let’s be clear–I’m
not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male
sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male
identity is very tentative and sensitive–but feminist rhetoric
doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much
trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t
understand men, and they demonize men. They accord to men far
more power than men actually have in sex. Women control the
sexual world in ways that most feminists simply don’t understand.

My explanation is that second-wave feminism dispensed with
motherhood. The ideal woman was the career woman–and I do
support that. To me, the mission of feminism is to remove all
barriers to women’s advancement in the social and political
realm–to give women equal opportunities with men. However, what
I kept saying in “Sexual Personae” is that equality in the
workplace is not going to solve the problems between men and
women which are occurring in the private, emotional realm, where
every man is subordinate to women, because he emerged as a tiny
helpless thing from a woman’s body. Professional women today
don’t want to think about this or deal with it.

The erasure of motherhood from feminist rhetoric has led us to
this current politicization of sex talk, which doesn’t allow
women to recognize their immense power vis-à-vis men. When
motherhood was more at the center of culture, you had mothers
who understood the fragility of boys and the boy’s need for
nurturance and for confidence to overcome his weaknesses. The
old-style country women–the Italian matriarchs and Jewish
mothers–they all understood the fragility of men. The mothers
ruled their own world and didn’t take men that seriously. They
understood how to nurture men and encourage them to be
strong–whereas current feminism simply doesn’t perceive the
power of women vis-a-vis men. But when you talk like this with
most men, it really resonates with them, and they say “Yes, yes!
That’s it!”

Currently, feminists lack sympathy and compassion for men and
for the difficulties that men face in the formation of their
identities. I’m not talking in terms of the men’s rights
movement, which got infected by p.c. The heterosexual
professional woman, emerging with her shiny Ivy League degree,
wants to communicate with her husband exactly the way she
communicates with her friends–as in “Sex and the City.” That
show really caught the animated way that women actually talk
with each other. But that’s not a style that straight men can
do! Gay men can do it, sure–but not straight men! Guess
what–women are different than men! When will feminism wake up to
this basic reality? Women relate differently to each other than
they do to men. And straight men do not have the same
communication skills or values as women–their brains are
different!

Are we letting the behavior of straight men off the hook here?
They’re just wired differently?

Wherever I go to speak, whether it’s Brazil or Italy or Norway,
I find that upper-middle-class professional women are very
unhappy. This is a global problem! And it’s coming from the fact
that women are expecting men to provide them with the same kind
of emotional and conversational support and intimacy that they
get from their women friends. And when they don’t get it,
they’re full of resentment and bitterness. It’s tragic!

Women are blaming men for a genuine problem that I say is
systemic. It has to do with the transition from the old,
agrarian culture to this urban professional culture, where women
don’t have that big support network that they had in the
countryside. All four of my grandparents and my mother were
born in Italy. In the small country towns they came from, the
extended family was the rule, and the women were a force unto
themselves. Women had a chatty group solidarity as they did
chores all day and took care of children and the elderly. Men
and women never had that much to do with each other over
history! There was the world of men and the world of women.
Now we’re working side-by-side in offices at the same job.
Women want to leave at the end of the day and have a happy
marriage at home, but then they put all this pressure on men
because they expect them to be exactly like their female
friends. If they feel restlessness or misery or malaise, they
automatically blame it on men. Men are not doing enough; men
aren’t sharing enough. But it’s not the fault of men that we
have this crazy and rather neurotic system where women are now
functioning like men in the workplace, with all its material
rewards. A huge problem here is that in America, we have
identified ourselves totally with our work lives. In most parts
of southern Europe, on the other hand, work is secondary to your
real life. It’s often said that Americans live to work, as
opposed to working to live.

Are we back in the 1990s? We’re talking about Clinton scandals,
about a potential Clinton/Bush presidency. We’re debating sexual
codes on campus again, political correctness in comedy. There’s
a would-be “billionaire” populist. Have things circled back
around to 1992 all over again? I thought we’d settled some of
these debates.

Yes, and it seems so strange that we’re having to argue
everything all over again! When I burst on the scene in the
early 1990s, one of the things that made me notorious was my
attack on the date-rape rhetoric of the time. The date-rape
issue had been heavily publicized since the late 1980s: there
were date-rape victims on the cover of People and being treated
like heroines on CNN’s Larry King Show. So my statements on the
topic, such as my 1991 op-ed in New York Newsday, caused a
firestorm. I wasn’t automatically kowtowing to the standard
rhetoric that men are at fault for everything and women are
utterly blameless. I said that my 1960s generation of women had
won the right to sexual freedom–but with rights came personal
responsibility. People went crazy! There was this absurd
polarization where men were portrayed as demons and women as
frail, innocent virgins. It was so Victorian! And there was
also a big fight about pornography, which I strongly supported.
In the 1990s, pro-sex feminism finally arose and took power. It
was an entire wing of feminism that had been suppressed by the
Gloria Steinem power structure–by Ms. Magazine and NOW– since
the 1970s. It had been forced underground, but it started to
emerge in San Francisco with the pro-sex and lipstick lesbians
in the mid to late 1980s, but it got no national attention.
Then all of a sudden, there was this big wave in the early
1990s. I became one of the outspoken figures of it after
“Sexual Personae” was published in 1990. My views had always
been suppressed, and I had had a lot of difficulty getting
published–”Sexual Personae” had been rejected by seven
publishers and five agents. So we fought those fights, but by
the late 1990s, the controversies subsided, because my wing of
pro-sex feminism had won!

Take Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon– you would not
believe how lionized those two women were. MacKinnon was
splashed on the cover of the New York Times Magazine and hailed
as the enlightened future of the world. Meanwhile they were
fanatical sex phobes. Dworkin was a raving hysteric about
sexuality, so overtly anti-male. So anyone who took the pro-sex
stance really had to fight hard for years. Everywhere I went to
speak there were organized pickets, often fomented by the
Village Voice, which organized a fax campaign against me
wherever I went. It was insane. And I had been a student of the
Village Voice! I had subscribed to it for years during its
great high point. But things had gotten so stupidly p.c. that
instead of being hailed as a product of that publication, I was
viciously defamed and libeled by it. You would not believe what
it was like!

Now, of course, everything has gone full circle. But how? What
the heck has happened? It’s very bizarre. There’s been a
reactionary reversion. Like that woman at Columbia hauling
around her mattress!

I wanted to ask you about that. If Emma Sulkowicz were a student
of yours, in an art class you were teaching, how would you grade
her work?

[laughs] I’d give her a D! I call it “mattress feminism.”
Perpetually lugging around your bad memories–never evolving or
moving on! It’s like a parody of the worst aspects of that kind
of grievance-oriented feminism. I called my feminism “Amazon
feminism” or “street-smart feminism,” where you remain vigilant,
learn how to defend yourself, and take responsibility for the
choices you make. If something bad happens, you learn from it.
You become stronger and move on. But hauling a mattress around
on campus? Columbia, one of the great Ivy League schools with a
tremendous history of scholarship, utterly disgraced itself in
how it handled that case. It enabled this protracted masochistic
exercise where a young woman trapped herself in her own bad
memories and publicly labeled herself as a victim, which will
now be her identity forever. This isn’t feminism–which should
empower women, not cripple them.

It’s yet more evidence of the current absence of psychology. To
go around exhibiting and foregrounding your wounds is a classic
neurotic symptom. But people are so lacking now in basic
Freudian consciousness–because Freud got thrown out of
mainstream feminism by Kate Millett and Gloria Steinem and
company. So no one sees the pathology in all this. And for
Columbia to permit this girl to carry her mattress onstage and
disrupt the commencement ceremony was absolutely ludicrous. It
demonstrates the total degradation of once eminent and admirable
educational institutions to caretaking nursery schools. I
prophesied this in a piece I wrote in 1992 for the Times
Literary Supplement called “The Nursery-School Campus”. At the
time, nobody understood what I was saying. But I was arguing
that the obsessive focus by American academe with students’
emotional well-being was not what European universities have
ever been concerned with. European universities don’t have this
consumer-oriented view that they have to make their students
enjoy themselves and feel good about themselves, with everything
driven by self-esteem. Now we have people emerging with Ivy
League degrees who have no idea how little they know about
history or literature. Their minds are shockingly untrained.
They’ve been treated as fragile emotional beings throughout
their schooling. The situation is worsening year by year, as
teachers have to watch what they say and give trigger warnings,
because God forbid that American students should have to
confront the brutal realities of human life.

Meanwhile, while all of this nursery-school enabling is going
on, we have the entire world veering towards ISIS–with barbaric
decapitations and gay guys being thrown off roofs and stoned to
death. All the harsh realities of human history are erupting,
and this young generation is going to be utterly unprepared to
deal with it. The nation is eventually going to be endangered by
the inability of several generations of young people to make
political decisions about a real world that they do not
understand. The primitive realities of human life are exploding
out there!

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/28/camille_paglia_how_bill_clinton_
is_like_bill_cosby/

 

[&]

On 08/02/2015 08:36 PM, Commie College wrote:
>

feminist crap all gone . i win

[FPP]

On 2015-08-03 00:36:11 +0000, "Commie College" <mar...@barackobama.com> said:

> Camille Paglia, the political and cultural critic, has been a
> brave and brilliant provocateur on Salon for almost 20 years
> now.

So... let me get this straight.

You guys HATE the commies over at Salon... until you find one you agree
with - and then butter melts in your mouth praising it.

Got it...
--
“There are three types of lies - lies, damn lies, and statistics.” ―Disraeli

[Barb May]

FPP wrote:
> On 2015-08-03 00:36:11 +0000, "Commie College"
> <mar...@barackobama.com> said:
>> Camille Paglia, the political and cultural critic, has been a
>> brave and brilliant provocateur on Salon for almost 20 years
>> now.
>
> So... let me get this straight.
>
> You guys HATE the commies over at Salon... until you find one you
> agree with - and then butter melts in your mouth praising it.
>
> Got it...

Another example of that left-wing bias in the media we're always hearing
about from wingnuts.

--
Barb