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Education

Education Camille Paglia style

(4 Posts)
Baggs Wed 04-Sep-19 06:02:16

Article about Paglia by Tunku Varadarajan.

The link might ask you to subscribe (initially £1) to the Wall Street Journal Europe Edition. I clicked on the the 'X' in top right corner of that request and paid nothing.

Alternatively, you could perhaps access the article directly via the Twitter account of Tunku Varadarajan, @tunkuv

LullyDully Wed 04-Sep-19 07:45:13

Sorry I can't access it. Could you give us the gist of the article please?

Riverwalk Wed 04-Sep-19 08:07:47

Here's an accessible link:

Paglia

Baggs Wed 04-Sep-19 10:51:03

Thank you, riverwalk. I've copied a pertinent chunk (quoted below) but the whole article is much better.

The chunk:

Although she doesn’t use the phrase herself, you can call Ms. Paglia a feminist capitalist. “While I believe that boom-and-bust capitalism is inherently Darwinian and requires moderate regulation for the long-term greater good,” she says, “I insist that capitalism has produced the glorious emancipation of women.” They can now “support themselves and live on their own, and no longer must humiliatingly depend on father or husband.”

So why do young women feel victimized? Ms. Paglia cites the near-extinction of “body language” among the young and its impact on sexual relations on campus. The “loss of body language” starts in middle and high school, “where there’s total absorption in social media and projected images on Instagram, and so on. So they don’t know how to read each other, physically.” When they get to college, this social deficiency is exacerbated by the effects of “that stupid law, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, that was passed in 1984.” It effected a nationwide ban on alcohol sales to adults under 21.

“When I got to college,” Ms. Paglia says, “you could go out for a beer, you could talk with a drink in a public place, in an adult environment.” That’s how 18-year-olds away from home for the first time learned the “art of conversation, of looking at each other, reading facial expressions and body language.” After the ban on drinking, “instead of a nice group of people conversing and flirting, you got the keg parties at fraternities on campus, this horrible environment where women milled about with men in this huge amount of noise, with people chugging beers down.”