Pissing on a fire is fucking stupid. There are tons of ways to put out a campfire, and urinating on it is basically at the bottom of that list, as any cub scout will tell you.

Sadly, the Chump in the White House is only 70, not 77.

Good Morning,
I had wanted to go the lecture but had another engagement.

Camille Paglia is one American I'd love to meet. I recall reading "Feminine Persona" oh, in the early 90s(?). I've also read her articles in the NYT, Harper's, The Atlantic etc. She is a gifted scholar and fine writer. I may disagree with her at times but I can agree to disagree. She pulls no punches. She reminds me of the late Christopher Hitchens. Hard to pigeonhole. She's outspoken & controversial but ultimately civil.

Good on her.

You know things are really bad when incoherent, self-contradictory anti-feminists like Camille Paglia are Back From the 90s (dead?).

So you sent an unprepared dude to half listen to a talk just so he could write up all the way she's a bad feminist.

Louis C.K. was making a joke, not an assertion. This "men need to tell OTHER MEN NOT TO RAPE" aggro-ass feminism does not accomplish anything but create rifts.

@2 (the second 2), if you are a woman and you know you need to be extremely careful walking home at night, or guard your drink at a club, or never let yourself be alone with certain men who've proven unsafe, then you know that men--a number of them--are a threat, whether C.K. was joking or not. Obviously, women are more likely to die of heart disease than by violence, so saying men are the "biggest threat" is hyperbole, at least if you're talking strictly about mortality (which we aren't, by the way; rape, inequality and abuse are also threats). But if a woman dies violently, it's always a good guess that she's been killed by a man.

@1

So you're saying she's a shitty archaeologist, too. . . .

Are you new to Paglia? She's always been the loathsome margarine to the "Alt-right"/Young Republican butter.

Her gimmick is saying everything Republicans say, but in the body of a "ivory tower academic lesbian feminist"

She offers no insight and it's a shame that this review offers no understanding of who she is in the context of her gimmick, just baseless optimism with no backing from her writings.

She's an utterly worthless shit-stirrer that gets trotted out to promote the GOP's narratives as "even the liberal academic lesbian Camille Pagliacci agrees that..."

Ugh autocorrect. Paglia, not Pagliacci.

She's a troll and provocateur, who lacks any substance.

"Let's give this Hitler guy and his supporters a chance to debate." --- German liberals in the 1920s and 1930s.

I mean, she could certainly play a Commedia role with her acting ability. Shame her career trended towards gender theory and conservative buffoonery-applications of such.

@12: Exfuckingactly. Duh brilliant

Just to clear up any confusion, my earlier comment was not directed to Paglia (who is definitely *not* a Nazi) but to Rich Smith's "…old enough to remember when Berkeley was the center of free speech, and not the center of protesters shutting down speech."

@12: Exfuckingactly. Such brilliant insight as "Sarah Palin is too brilliant and also the best Feminist ever".

Knee-jerk contrarian clickbait and somehow dumber than Thomas Friedman.

@16: She does believe there is [pseudo]intellectual value in the beliefs of the current crop of Alt-Right Neo-Nazis, so no clarification needed to begin with.

I've said before and I'll say it again, that woman is a bubble of bullshit held together by the surface tension of her own hubris.

I remember reading some Paglia piece where she talked about how she was really opposed to mainstream feminism because some people in NOW were dismissive of her. That was just buried in the middle of some rant in Salon or some other online source, but I thought it really was revealing. She's more interested in who kissed her ass than who's right.

@20: I've never read any actual insight from her, I wonder if she's accidentally said something that makes sense outside of her reframing of social conservative/regressive (and now apparently evo-psych!) claims as "feminism".

Women need men because (feminism)
Women deserve to be paid less because (feminism)
Women should listen to men more because (feminism)
Feminism is holding women back because (feminism)

Blah blah blah.

'Sanctimonious liberals' is an oxymoron.

raindrop defending the reputation and honor of liberals! Is that a first?

If she were an actual ivory-tower academic she'd be at an actual academy

Oops, I should have said it's redundant.

Too late, doof.

@26. Yeah, that's fair.

I did appreciate her mid-90's stance of poking some holes in the frankly racist and sex-negative wave of feminist thought that was all the rage at the time.

Sending a reporter to cover a lecture, who not only hasn't read the speaker's latest book but actually admits such in the article (indicating that it won't incur consequences from higher ups), well, that is literally just what I would expect from "The Stranger." Half the effort, twice the opinions.

@30, that may be, but I'm pointing out a flouting of journalistic convention that occurs frequently with this periodical.

@28: I don't remember her snarking on intersectionality but she'll take any position that involves attacking "liberal feminism" independent of accuracy or not.

It's your usual stopped clock regressive. I may agree with some aspects of Ron Paul's complaints about warmongering but how he gets there and what he'd replace as "freedom" is horrid. She doesn't deserve any kudos.

@30: Still be better to have someone like Mudede counter-trolling.

Granted he has much better, less head-explodey events to attend.

The domestic violence data in the US suggests rough parity. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Public Health said this:

"Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…

The non-political Domestic Violence Research Group has a page of data. One notable statement:

"Rates of female-perpetrated violence higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)."
http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/…

The domestic violence data in the US suggests rough parity. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Public Health said this:

"Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…

The non-political Domestic Violence Research Group has a page of data. One notable statement:

"Rates of female-perpetrated violence higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)."
http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/…

The domestic violence data in the US suggest approximate parity. A 2007 study published in the American Journal of Public Health said this:

"Almost 24% of all relationships had some violence, and half (49.7%) of those were reciprocally violent. In nonreciprocally violent relationships, women were the perpetrators in more than 70% of the cases.”
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article…

The non-political Domestic Violence Research Group has a page of data. One notable statement:

"Rates of female-perpetrated violence higher than male-perpetrated (28.3% vs. 21.6%)."
http://www.domesticviolenceresearch.org/…

The sign-up is a mess.

"A second measurement issue pertains to the scope of violence measures. The 3 questions included in the Add Health study do not capture all forms of violence that occur between relationship partners, including many of the more severe forms of partner violence on the Conflict Tactics Scale (e.g., used a knife or gun, choked, or burned). Questions about emotional, verbal, psychological, or sexual aggression were also not included."

Okay... Those aspects of domestic abuse kinda have to be included (and not in a solely self-reporting setting I might add) before I'm going to believe claims of parity in rates of IPV.

she's right. you're wrong. whom she votes for does not denote her "identity," so if she's vacillating it doesn't mean she's searching for her identity. if anything that is a hallmark of the political parties being utterly unhinged, a whirligig between left, right and centre, and log-rolling, and corporate interests, and corruption etc. so she probably votes for policy and not party (or skin tone or gender), which actually shows INTELLIGENCE, the ability to reason and see nuance, which is lost on so many people today, hung up on narrow-minded views, unable to even LISTEN to dissenting views. and when they do, only being reductive and snide about it. indeed, paglia seems VERY clear about who she is and what she believes, unlike so many jargon-wielding academics, intellectuals and journalists today. she's absolutely right that biology should be part of gender studies. she is absolutely right that slapping post-structuralist theories on a work of art does not help us to understand it better, whereas context does. text and context go together. half the people in colleges and universities don't know their history; and she's right! that's half the problem. instead they throw around words like decolonization and intersectionality; they worry about phobias and washrooms. and all this while people are living on food stamps, people are at war, and the climate is burning up. there's no sense of pragmatism. fly off to conferences and give papers but do nothing while at the same time telling people to "check their privilege". what a time. thank goodness she cuts through the crap.