‘What you’re seeing is how a civilization commits suicide,” says Camille Paglia in an interview with Bari Weiss of the Wall Street Journal. This self-described “notorious Amazon feminist” isn’t telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can’t Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that’s just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.
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| Camille Paglia |
When Ms. Paglia, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of “Sexual Personae,” she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement’s establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled “Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson,” and it’s easy to see why. “If civilization had been left in female hands,” she wrote, “we would still be living in grass huts.”
But no subject gets her going more than what she sees as the connection between society’s attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.