Highly rec'd.

The article starts out pretty great, but what the hell happened in the second half of the piece? It's like she forgot what she was writing about. Digression can be an interesting literary device, but aren't you supposed to get back to the subject at hand at some point?

Thanks for linking to this, otherwise I would have missed it. I don't happen to agree with many of her points here, but, as always, Camille is the great motormouth pouring forth tons of delightful metaphors and analogies.

hrebendorf says:

Digression can be an interesting literary device, but aren't you supposed to get back to the subject at hand at some point?

Digression is a Camille specialty. It's the way her brain works. If you don't like someone who thinks like internet surfing works, you'll always be unhappy with her work. If you want to see a master of stream of consciousness at work, listen to her being interviewed by anyone.

I would suspect people who despise the concept of "truthiness" and go exclusively by "just the facts" are never going to like Paglia. Bright minds who have delved deeply into comparative culture and/or comparative mythology will always end up sounding "truthy," because they have found out that there is no "truth" to be found at the bottom of the huge pile they are continually digging through, only interrelated thoughts. Joseph Campbell is another good example of this. The idea is that they are not expecting you to totally buy into their version of truthiness as "fact", just to use it to get your own neural networks flowing.

Oh, she just LOOKS like she is dead. sorry.

The pugilist feminist speaks!

Thanks for the link.

For me, the best I had read re: feminists on this election, were Rebecca Walker, Pollit and Naomi Wolf. Now I'll add Paglia to the list.

"inflamed gender"? wuzzat?

Every once in a while, if you put a monkey at a keyboard, it will type out something that makes sense.

Sorry, I think that Camille's brilliance is mostly in her own head and that she takes many of her positions simply to be contrarian. Combine that with her hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-sledgehammer writing style, and she's about as dreary and predictable as they come.

Still, she has been mostly right about Hillary.

Deserted Cities of the Heart is one of my favorites songs.

Ha! I loved her snarls regarding Faludi and ripping apart the "iron my shirt" myth.

Well, this is perfect - I've seen recommendations on this site for MoDo, Peggy Noonan - and now Camille Paglia, all in an attempt to grind that you-know-what Clinton into the dust. Too bad Phyllis Schlafly isn't getting around too much these days, I'm sure she'd have a bang up analysis to link to.

If I were the average Obama enthusiast I might want to just say ix-nay on recommending the azy-cra, and instead try to do some serious damage control for the countless times some Obama supporters have at the very least not condemned the rampant misogyny in much of the MSM's commentary about Hillary Clinton, if not outrightly fanning it. I would tell people like Noonan and Paglia to take their right-wing crap about Hillary and stick it where the sun don't shine. And I would be very concerned about the millions of women who proudly voted for Hillary, the first female candidate with a serious shot at winning, and how they feel now that their dream of a woman president is delayed a bit longer. I would make every attempt to welcome them with open arms into the Obama camp, and swearing off the Hillary bashing would be a super start.

But that's just me.

Well said. I hate praising blowhards like Paglia (or the far less witty Dick Morris) just because they're on the same side as us in this race, but in this particular instance, Camile's pretty much nailed it.

I'll say this for Paglia, she may be kind of anti-intellectual in her criticism of academia but she herself is far less shallow than Maureen Dowd (faint praise I guess). Lord, seeing Dowd, Morris, and Paglia praising Obama makes me feel a twinge of sympathy for intelligent Republicans who find themselves on the same side as Limbaugh, O'Reilly, and Hannity. But at least our media schmucks aren't sociopaths!