Eccentric academic Camille Paglia appears to be a Cassandra, prophesying our destruction in words we refuse to believe. Her incisive observations about men and women offer a path out of confusion. In a world so muddled by fuzzy thinking on the real and noticeable differences between men and women, Paglia states with blunt precision what the real world looks like.
Her observations are not meant to be prescriptive, it seems, but simply reflecting what is already there. Feminism, that “harmless” doctrine of equality, starts to confuse because people are armed with hammers and sent out into society looking for a nail. Feminists who see difference and inequality lurking in every corner want to demand justice and “correct” the world to fit their view of how it should be.
To many a feminist, all of human history, save a few hallowed exceptions, is a dismal slog of female oppression. Say nothing of the men continually sacrificing themselves in hard labor and wars, the view from a sleek Apple computer is that men held all the power and had their day in the sun. Now, we are told with a threatening grimace, the “future is female.”
One of the strangest results of this thinking is viewing childbearing as oppression. Certainly, it is extraordinarily difficult, sometimes fatal, in some sad instances coerced and generally full of trials. However, there was no group of men who conspired to oppress women in this fashion. We all awake to reality and find that women bear children and men do not. Rather than fixating on manipulating this biological fact on which the future generations all depend, we could accept that there are, in fact, differences between men and women and total equality will never be achieved.
Paglia, by no means a housewife following traditional womanly norms, demonstrates a refreshing curiosity in exploring the differences between the sexes. Observing how men and women behave, despite decades of browbeating by the ascendent feminists, Paglia points to realities that will not be eroded without serious harm. She is arguably at her best when she attempts to speak reason to women about what men are like and how they behave. Her reasoning has won her a place of honor among the oft-maligned Men’s Rights Advocates.
The fact of the matter is, however often denied and ignored by our mass delusion called mainstream feminism, men are on average bigger and stronger than women. The comfortably cushioned middle class mother or public school teacher may casually reassure you that our global economy is so interconnected that we have “moved beyond wars.” But we are physical beings with acute material needs. We will never move beyond primal struggle to attain food and clean water, erect shelter, and defend against physical threats. As Paglia observes, when dangerous circumstances arise—power outages, sewage in the streets, the Texas ice storm—men are the ones who sally forth to meet the threat.
Men are also, as Paglia notes, most often the people who exhibit antisocial predatory behavior. This is not something that the mandatory consent training at your Ivy League is going to cure. Feminist fantasies would have you believe that a man who uses his physical advantage for evil is proof of a system that is rotten and sexist. Quite the opposite. The rarity with which men in many cultures victimize women is an indication that the West, broadly speaking, had a fairly good system for dealing with men.
Now, after decades of full-scale feminism, women are not more safe but less. The terrifying explosion of so-called “femicides” is not the result of a stable culture in which a clear understanding of roles and norms exist. Further stirring the pot seems unlikely to fix it. Of course, that does not remove personal culpability for murderers and rapists, but the solution is not more castigating men.
The problem is societal and manifests as personal. Confused little girls stumble into encounters that make them feel icky and then want to claim an aggression has occurred. Sometimes all that’s happened is profound miscommunication. When the starting principles are off, people will behave in ways that do not accord with reality. Generations of girls have been taught that men seek to oppress them and their superiority in physical strength is irrelevant. In one of her greatest lines (which is curiously difficult to track down in full at the moment), Paglia says women “should regard men with a mix of gratitude and rational fear.”
In an age of unprecedented leisure and luxury, many women are haunted by specters of oppression at every turn. There is no battle of the sexes writ large and refereed on high. There is, as always, only the personal connections of individual men and women. The assumptions they have about each other can do much to propel them to harmony or conflict. Is feminism making life more harmonious?
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