Gucci Little Piggy

Kicking. Squealing.

Old clip of Camille Paglia on Bill Maher

Came across this old episode (1995) of Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect in which he talks with Camille Paglia.  I wouldn’t expect someone with Paglia’s strong opinions to be allowed on TV to make them without someone there to counterbalance them.  But perhaps that’s more a function of the fact that feminism of that era was much more strident than it currently is.  The feminism of today is less radical – people like Paglia and other feminist critics stomped out all of the big radical feminist anti-male arguments.  Feminism is much more nefarious now and focuses more on disparate outcomes rather than power structures.  The point of hers that I’d never heard before is that the rise of the supermodels served as a replacement for the lost glamor of Hollywood (she singles out Meryl Streep as a prime example of this turn).

About these ads

18 Responses to Old clip of Camille Paglia on Bill Maher

  1. PA 11/25/2012 at 9:39 am

    Camille Paglia, one of my favorite subjects of discussion. And yes, she really has it in for Streep.

    Lefties despise her. Back in the early 90s she was getting death threats over her date-rape scepticism. Now, they rip her for global warning scepticism. It would be interesting to get her talking about rightle counter-thought to prevailing liberal ideology. A few years ago (dont know if she still does) she ran a column on Salon in the format of Q&A from her readers. It appeared at the time that her notion of conservatism was that it’s conventional, party-line Bush/GOP pro-war cheerleading.

    So I wonder is she’s aware of the new conservatism that is the alt-Right — with its sophisticated arguments about traditionalism, immigration, race, men’s rights, etc. In other words, how woudl she engage Auster or Heartiste?

    (As I like to point out whenever subject comes up, I met Paglia in the late 90s and had a nice conversation with her. She was very delightful to talk with.)

  2. Asdf 11/25/2012 at 9:52 am

    Like Rand Paglia has a lot of testosterone running through her creating a strong desire for an alpha male strong enough to dominate her. No half men will do, she’d rather fuck actual women. The strong desire for alpha makes rejecting the Daddy party wholesale impossible.

  3. SOBL1 11/25/2012 at 10:42 am

    I agree with Paglia on the lost glam of Hollywood. In the ’90s, it might have been Sharon Stone and that was all that realized the classy sex appeal image, and even then it was fleeting (Paglia has mentioned Stone being Liz Taylor-esque). While Paglia and her ilk were a counterwave to the radical feminists, didn’t the feminists surrender of integrity during the Clinton-Lewinsky debacle hurt them as well? To spend decades crying about sexual harassment, which peaked with the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, only to turn around within 5 years and defend a 50+ yr old man cigar banging a 20-something solely because he was a democrat revealed their false stance of seeking change and protection for women. The feminists shouted about Sen. Bob Packwood being a sexual predator, but cheerleaded and defended Bubba, revealing their political reality of Dem attack dogs for gender issues. If I recall correctly, some feminists even liked the Lewinsky issue as they said it was a new development in feminisim of women using sexual powers to get what they want.

    Christina Hoff Sommers also did great work in exposing how the feminist movement went from equality to superiority really quick and used the education system to do so. She sounded like a voice of reason in ’90s gender relation roundtable discussions. Her concerns 15 years ago about the direction of the education system with regards to boys have proven to be true.

    Maher’s PI was far superior to his current HBO schtick. It’s like the cancellation off of network made him morbitter and less jovial. There was a strong element of mocking the absurdity of the modern era on PI, which is not present on Real Time as it is solely liberal propaganda and crocodile humor.

  4. Laguna Beach Fogey 11/25/2012 at 10:55 am

    Ah yes, Paglia at her peak.

    Here’s a review of Paglia’s latest book at Counter-Currents:

    http://www.counter-currents.com/2012/10/camille-paglias-glittering-images/

  5. dana 11/25/2012 at 10:57 am

    i am so old i purchased this episode of PI on videotape after watching it in real time :( what’s even better but not available anywhere i can find online yet was her firing line debate with Wm F Buckley on feminism

  6. culdesachero 11/25/2012 at 11:11 am

    Thanks for reminding me that for a brief moment, feminism almost embraced reality. Unfortumately, the power of identity politics was to tempting to be ignored.

  7. PA 11/25/2012 at 11:37 am

    Laguna’s “Counter Currents” article is well-worth the read for its look back at Paglia’s classic “Sexual Personae”.

    The article reminded me that Paglia is familiar and sympathetic to right wing talk radio. While I’ve never really listened to it so I can’t say how much of its implicitly-white populism is just a specie of rah-rah GOP patriotardism. Thus it would be interesting to know Paglia’s familiarity with principled alt-Right, which as we know parts ways with conventional Republican conservatism on many fronts.

    As I’ve noted previously, alt-Right itself is a synthesis of ideas promoted by Paglia as well as by Pat Buchanan, in a way a paganized (post-Christain?) rebirth of the defeated Old Right.

  8. David F. 11/25/2012 at 3:39 pm

    Paglia’s worldview is fundamentally Catholic. This is why she tends to get along so well with figures on the alt-right. She believes in objective Reality, the existence of distinct male and female natures, and accepts that reality and human nature put limits on our choices. She also believes in free will and the necessity of accepting responsibility for “breaking the rules.”

    Paglia loves to break the rules, but she never pretends that the rules do not exist. She certainly doesn’t expect people to “accept” her ideas and lifestyle as equivalent to that of her pious Catholic sibling. She’s deviant and proud of it, but has no difficulty recognizing the good in a traditional moral lifestyle. (After all, if everyone were deviant, what would be the fun in it…and how would society survive to allow the enjoyment of deviance in the future?)

  9. bjk 11/25/2012 at 7:43 pm

    My first impression was, wow, Maher’s got a ton more confidence now than 17 years ago. And much more bitterness.

  10. Rifleman 11/25/2012 at 9:28 pm

    dana 11/25/2012 at 10:57 am
    i am so old i purchased this episode of PI on videotape after watching it in real time what’s even better but not available anywhere i can find online yet was her firing line debate with Wm F Buckley on feminism

    Here’s a transcript. You’ll have to enlarge the text:

    A Firing Line Debate: Resolved: That the Women’s Movement Has Been Disastrous

    http://www.scribd.com/doc/98897909/Arianna-Huffington-on-the-Firing-Line-Feminism-1994

  11. C.R. 11/25/2012 at 10:46 pm

    bjk,

    exactly what i thought. he was way more humble then. i’d always liked him up until about 4 years ago – back when he was on ABC and CC.

  12. Dain Fitzgerald (@PolitixDain) 11/26/2012 at 12:54 am

    I saw Paglia speak maybe 5 years ago in San Francisco, pushing a book about poetry I think. It was a jam packed room with a very respectful, mostly female crowd in attendance.

    Yea mid-90s appeared to be her peak, especially in her political role. I recall her (really) brief cameo in the It’s Pat movie, oddly enough for someone that defends clear cut gender roles.

  13. Lara 11/26/2012 at 7:23 am

    Bill Maher was funny up until Religulous came out. He was mean to people who were nice to him, which made him look like a jerk.

  14. SOBL1 11/26/2012 at 8:08 am

    Lara – An interesting thing about Maher is that he was raised in a home with a split religious background where the parents seemed to have a religious stand off on how to raise him and didnt resolve it well. Go figure that as an adult, Maher is super anti-religious.

    Plus, he looks like Joe Camel. That’s a reason to be bitter.

  15. Höllenhund 11/26/2012 at 11:09 am

    It’s interesting to see Bill Maher, of all people, push the Red Pill in this 2002 interview recently uploaded to youtube:

    youtube.com/watch?v=Tl69E-0FwyI

  16. Lara 11/26/2012 at 11:50 am

    For all of Bill Maher’s supposed hatred of religion, I remember him becoming very defensive when he had someone on his show who was critical of Israel. I believe it was one of the authors of the book The Israel Lobby.

  17. Lara 11/26/2012 at 12:03 pm

    I don’t really mind Bill Maher’s ridicule of white, religious, middle America. No group is above that.

  18. JP 11/26/2012 at 4:54 pm

    Hollen, have you not seen his comedy tour from a few years ago with a bit on feminism?

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: