Only a woman with solid feminist bona fides can make this argument in modern America. The high tech economy has leveled the playing field between men and women. This is a great development. But it ignores, like the Democratic party in general, a larger reality: blue collar men. White collar men are indoctrinated in high school and college now how to behave around women. But blue collar men are not. And there are more of them than white collar Ivy Leaguers. Give the video a watch. It’s refreshing.
On a similar note, about American culture in general, she makes a very trenchant critique about us: “a culture that believes in nothing and tolerates everything is doomed.”
Oakchair
White collar men are indoctrinated in high school and college now how to behave around women. But blue collar men are not.
—-
We’re all indoctrinated in more ways than we can imagine.
Women are indoctrinated to slather their bodies with expensive cancer causing chemicals, wear uncomfortable shoes, put on dysfunctional long nails, paint their nails and hair with toxic fumes, and spend hundreds-thousands on beauty products. If advertising was honest the adds for all these products would be: “Forget equality lets get hot for the patriarchy!”
Many of these wealthy highly educated women demanding poor uneducated men overcome their conditioning need to take a good hard look in the mirror. You want men to put effort to address sexism? You first because lecturing people while you’re a walking billboard for a shallow sexist society isn’t helping.
Hiero
“Toxic masculinity” perfectly encapsulates the stupid slop I have to hear from insecure losers and dealing with psychos who can’t be bothered to conform to basic levels of civilized interactions – it’s not just uppity bitches that don’t care for it. Hardly a gratuitous insult. Living masculinity as a tough, hardy, physical risk-taker who brings home the meat doesn’t require any of that (an example set by my own father, not some PMC annual training) – bolting this poor behavior and character trait set onto masculinity as an inherent component is a far more gratuitous insult than a perfectly descriptive phrase of bad male behavior.
I’ll also submit that Paglia’s lecture is full of unnuanced anecdotal hot takes about societal roles of men and women that are hyperbolic enough to be hilarious, which is fine, I can appreciate this. But she clearly has never met women like my mother, who was the furthest thing from tittering around a hearth.
Next time I have to don tyvek with a female colleague on a site this lecture is inevitably going to be the first thing to pop into my head. I admit I guess I just don’t know what the fuck she is talking about.
Ian Welsh
The toughest men I knew seemed like pussycats 99% of the time. One Uncle (the only man I knew who wasn’t scared of my father) I only saw sound dangerous twice. Scary as hell, and absolutely calm even as he explained the consequences of someone continuing their unacceptable behaviour.
The rest of the time he was a merry raconteur and an absolute gentleman in the best mid-twentieth century sense of the word. I would have trusted him with any woman and any child and known they would come to no harm from him or while he was around.
That’s the only masculinity worth having.
Hiero
I’ll temper my first reply by agreeing 1000% that blue collar voters (men and women) aren’t going to respond to bougie shaming of toxic masculinity (or any kind of bougie shaming). The fix for this bad strategy (imho) isn’t to reactively shame the concept and lean into some generalized concept of trad gender roles as a model to which to return (mmga?), but probably a better result all around would come from attempting to address the issues of precarity and insecurity among the blue collar population that are probably creating the conditions for toxic masculinity to thrive.
Soredemos
Oof, sorry, but Paglia is goofy contrarian. That’s been her entire career gimmick. I’m not sure she has ‘feminist bona fides’ either; most feminists don’t seem to like her much.
(Now, admittedly, I don’t pay much attention to any flavor of liberal feminism anymore. If you’re not going to found your analysis in the basic issue of labor, like a Kollontaian Marxist feminist, then youre doomed to have at best an incomplete view that ultimately goes nowhere.)
Last I heard of Paglia was when she did some interview thing with Jordan Peterson and they just verbally dribbled at each other for an hour.
Paglia is, among other things, relentlessly pretentious. So her verdict of what constitutes worth in a civilization is stuff that might end up in a museum or as a great monument. Since she can’t comprehend the core issue of labor and that women were predominantly excluded from the higher culture she values for much of history, her view of civilization is that men created it. In reality it wasn’t men alone working the fields and digging the ditches that civilization depends on, and once women started being admitted to those other levels in greater numbers they competed neck and neck with men.)
As a man, I find ‘toxic masculinity’ often very loosely defined and basically worthless as any kid of analytical tool (I don’t pay attention to claims of things like supposed ‘manspreading’ either. Even if actually real, do we seriously have nothing else to talk about of importance? The brunch crowd lives very sheltered, privileged lives if these are the issues they focus on). But it’s evocative of some core concept that has plenty of merit, I think. I’ve seen a lot of destructive and self-destructive behavior done in the name of proving manhood. I’m not sure I’ve seen a feminine equivalent.
Over time I’ve found neither masculinity nor femininity to be actually useful categories for dividing up attitudes or behaviors. Get a hundred men to define manliness and you get a hundred different answers. At best it seems to just be a way to section off virtues and claim them as a masculine domain, and then anything left over is ‘effeminate’, which is interchangeable with bad.
As far as I can tell ‘positive masculinity’ is just a bunch of attributes I would expect as a baseline for any reasonably functioning adult, of either sex.
Throughout my career I’ve worked predominantly with women coworkers amd bosses. Any notions that women need to be grateful to men, who supposedly create everything, just sort of naturally falls away over time as it’s self-evidently absurd.
Oakchair
a better result all around would come from attempting to address the issues of precarity and insecurity…creating the conditions for toxic masculinity to thrive.
—-
Ah, but that would entail the rich and privileged losing some wealth and privledge. They oppose that and have the money and social control to abort any attempts while they’re the womb.
someofparts
Camille Paglia has solid feminist bona fides?
You guys are literally mansplaining feminism to me?
I am embarrassed for you. This is a sexist clown show.
Imagining that Paglia has feminist bona fides is ignorance on steroids.
someofparts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katha_Pollitt
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269147-dirtbag
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ani_DiFranco
Feminism, much like the Arab resistance, is not as dead as you think it is.
StewartM
Soredemos
Oof, sorry, but Paglia is goofy contrarian.
Coming out of lurk mode for a post, but you nailed it. Except she’s even abandoned some of her better positions of yore to become even more mainstream and rightwing. I personally doubt her stories about the kids not knowing who Moses was or Hitler, to be honest, especially the former given that still 70 % of the country is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, and kids in their households should know who Moses was, right?
As the US totters on the edge of Christofascism, saying that the secular humanists are the problem and that our problem is too much tolerance is just being willfully blind. As for “believing in something”, the first place to start is our large fraction of people who cite “moral values” as their ticket for disbelieving things that are objectively true, or in believing things that can’t be true. Say, for the Genesis flood story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6apFLhUjYs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdkY3yxXmqg
As for “toxic masculinity”, it seems about defending whatever that is with working class males is akin to defending their racism and ethnocentrism, which they also very often have. I miss the days when we had “leftists” who told us that we were a ‘sick society’ because then you start questioning yourself and your values you are more likely to change than when you continue mindless cheerleading for ‘Merica’ that we too-often get now, from our “leftists” too.
Ian, I tell people I only recall my dad spanking me once, and a very perfunctory spanking at that He was a drill sargent in the reserves, and was used to terrifying 20-year old recruits with his voice, and he used the same voice on us kids! Heck, he even terrorized customers at the family business with the same voice! But hit us kids? No.
And for tough guys, remember mean drunk John Wayne made movies, while ‘timid’ guys like Tom Landry, George McGovern, Jimmy Stewart, and Clark Gable flew actual combat missions. I remember as a boy talking to WWII combat veterans at my family’s business, and while I got some stories, they were often mum about it–didn’t want to say much.
someofparts
Paglia is a shabby opportunist who has made nice bank telling sexist young libertarian dudes what they want to hear.
and another actual feminist –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jessica_Valenti