Camille Paglia
History moves in cycles. The
plague of political correctness and assaults on free speech that erupted in the
1980s and were beaten back in the 1990s have returned with a vengeance. In the
U.S., the universities as well as the mainstream media are currently patrolled
by well-meaning but ruthless thought police, as dogmatic in their views as
agents of the Spanish Inquisition. We are plunged once again into an ethical
chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty
is crushed by the tyranny of the group.
The premier principles of my
new book, Free Women, Free Men, are
free thought and free speech–open, mobile and unconstrained by either liberal
or conservative ideology. The liberal-vs.-conservative dichotomy, dating from
the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly
outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global
politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so
extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes
resembles mental illness, severed from the common-sense realities of everyday
life.
My dissident brand of feminism
is grounded in my own childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the
suffocating conformism of the 1950s, when Americans, exhausted by two decades
of economic instability and war, reverted to a Victorian cult of domesticity
that limited young girls’ aspirations and confined them (in my jaundiced view)
to a simpering, saccharine femininity.
In 1991, New York Newsday
published my op-ed on date rape, which remains the most controversial thing I
have ever written. In it, I argued that women today (then as now) were misusing
the freedom that my generation had fought for, and won, by not accepting
personal risk. I wrote at the time that young feminists are deluded: they come
from a protected, white middle-class world and expect everything to be safe.
Women infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual
encounters to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees, parental proxies
unworthy of true feminists. My baby-boom generation demanded and won an end to
such parietal rules, and it is tragic indeed how so many of today’s young women
seem to long for a return of those hovering paternalistic safeguards.
Syndicated in regional newspapers from coast to coast in haphazard
truncated form, the op-ed caused a huge backlash. There was a coordinated
campaign, evidently emanating from feminist groups in the Midwest, to harass
the president of my university with demands for my firing. That article, often
reprinted in freshman-composition course packs at state universities, caused me
endless trouble throughout the 1990s. It led to picketing and protests at my
outside campus lectures and to my own walk-offs (to avoid fisticuffs) from
Austrian and British TV talk shows and even from the stage of Queen Elizabeth
Hall in London.
I still stand by every word of
my date-rape manifesto. As a career college teacher, I want our coddling,
authoritarian universities to end all involvement with or surveillance of
students’ social lives and personal interactions, verbal or otherwise. If a crime
is committed, it should be reported to the police. Otherwise, college
administrations should mind their own business and focus on facilitating and
funding education in the classroom.
The free speech movement, led by a fiery Italian American, Mario Savio,
erupted at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, the year I entered
college. It was a cardinal moment for my generation. The antiestablishment
stance of the Free Speech Movement represented the authentic populist
revolution of the 1960s, which resisted encroachments of authority by a
repressive elite. The freedom to hate must be as protected as the freedom to
love. It is only when hate crosses over into action that the law may properly
intervene. How is it possible that today’s academic left has supported rather
than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and
over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their
educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious
bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place
in a modern democracy. An enlightened feminism, animated by a courageous code
of personal responsibility, can only be built upon a wary alliance of strong
women and strong men.
Camille Paglia, This appears in the April 03, 2017 issue of TIME.
Paglia is a feminist and the author of the new book Free Women,
Free Men (Pantheon), from wich this was
adapted. Copyright © 2017 by Camille Paglia
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