Is Western Civilization in Jeopardy?

Contrarian feminist scholar Camille Paglia is an acquired taste.

In a short exposé interview with The National, she is described as “an anti-feminist feminist [and] a transgender person critical of some transgender fights.” Here is the video.

I used Paglia extensively throughout the final chapter of my undergraduate theology dissertation. Her sentences are carefully stylized. They are short and assertive; creating a sharp "stabbing" effect. According to Paglia, this unique style was influenced by listing to the harsh rhythmic beat of rock music.

Whatever its inspiration, her writing process is far from a hollow guise. The same magnetic forceful provocative self-styled “Amazonian Feminist” is continually manifest and embodied in real life.

She has unapologetically described Taylor Swift as an “obnoxious Nazi Barbie.”

Apparently, Gloria Steinem is a “mummified fascist.”

No kidding.

Needless to say, Paglia never has a dull moment.

Furthermore, she has never fully allied with any sizable academic movement. Her current affiliation with cultural libertarianism (the 'Rubin Report' etc.) is fairly loose. According to her, all the potentially great writers who would have resonated with her died younger or suffered a mental infirmity as a result of taking crystal acid or LSD.

There may be some truth to this. After all, the opening line of Allen Ginsburg's infamous poem "Howl" bemoans the corrosive effect of recreational drugs (and electroshock gay conversion therapy).

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix."

To many critics, Paglia is exacerbating. She appears to advocate a bewilderingly opaque eclecticism which contrasts the Classicist, Romanticist, hippy, and agrarian worlds against those of Christendom, Neo-Marxism, and suburbia.

For all her flaws, I have a qualified admiration for Paglia. She is clearly a shock-jock and evidently revels in this role. However, she has also had the audacity to pursue unpopular areas in academic inquiry and put her career on the line in the process. Anyone who adopts the posture of an academic provocateur upon themselves is both blessed and cursed.

Blessed with the freedom to name and shame incongruities inherent to prevailing orthodoxies. Cursed with a two-dimensional Joker-like motif.

Thus, her contention that Western Culture in its current form is potentially on the brink of collapse should be taken with a strong pinch of salt.

Neither-the-less, I reckon there is something to it.

Sexual Personae

Camille first gained notoriety upon the publication of Sexual Personae. This 700-page tome is the full edition of her original doctoral thesis.

Sexual Personae explores the relationship between androgyny and cultural decadence.

She contends that whenever cultures make significant moves towards blurring the complementary polarity of masculinity and femininity they are reaching the end of their lifecycle.

According to Paglia, we are all called to have a robust independent sexual persona: a role we play in relation to others. When men and women are free to be themselves in relation to one another and bohemian dissidents are afforded their own necessarily tenuous, experimental and somewhat underground habitation, societies function well.

Paglia (and John Paul II) have stumbled upon something fundamental about the nature and role of desire in a social and inter-relational context which their contemporaries on the right and left have missed.

So often, modern conceptions of sexuality emphasize "biological urges" as if they pertained to some kind of stasis which is merely facile. Rather, for Paglia sexuality has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Masculinity has a difference corresponding to femininity. Both personas are informed and defined in relation to each other.

Paglia argues that our contemporary sweeping interest in sexual androgyny (David Bowie, Lady Gaga, Queer Culture) may, in fact, signal a lack of cultural confidence and self-definition. Rather than discovering identity, free identities are being lost.

She draws interesting parallels between the Collapse of the Roman Empire and Western Cavillation.

It is very important to realize what Paglia is not saying. After all, she is a lesbian who continually places herself between masculinity and femininity.

Androgyny still has a place. However, for Paglia, whenever it is given a precedence, trouble is on the horizon.

Whatever your thoughts about Paglia, it’s an interesting theory (probably with the useful combination of genius and crackpot elements).