[Vision2020] Blessed be the ties that bind . . .

[Melynda Huskey]

Now it may be that I'm swift to dismiss Paglia because I happen to know that 
she was fired in disgrace from her first professorial job for KICKING a 
student who disagreed with her in class . . . but I see such pervasive 
woman-hating in her work that it's very hard for me to take her any more 
seriously than, say, Beverly LeHaye.

Where does one begin with a writer who claims to be a philosopher but who 
writes, "My explanation for the male domination of art, science, and 
politics, an indisputable fact of history, is based on an analogy between 
sexual physiology and aesthetics. . . .all cultural achievement is a 
projection, a swerve into Apollonian transcendence, and that men are 
anatomically destined to be projectors."

Yes, and then there's this:

"When I cross the George Washington Bridge, or any of America's great 
bridges, I think: *men* have done this.  Construction is a sublime male 
poetry.  When I see a giant crane passing on a flatbed truck, I pause in awe 
and reverence, as one would for a church procession. . . .If civilization 
had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."

It's instructive to substitute "white" for "male" and "black" for "female" 
in Paglia's work.  The rhetoric, the argument, and the ethos snap right in 
to focus.  Paglia's fifteen minutes rested primarily on the fact that she 
was a lesbian academic who called herself a feminist--and then said far more 
hateful things about women than most men would ever dream of.  Nothing sells 
like a Quisling.

Now, of course, women who hate women are a growth industry, and we're back 
in the trough of that ten-year cycle where women are being admonished that 
it's feminism that makes them unhappy, not sexism.  If you'll just take 
Danielle Crittenden's advice and marry young, stay home, and have children 
right away, *then* get a job once the kids are in school, you'll be 
fulfilled.  Of course, the 50% of women who divorce within five years of 
marriage--in time to have a couple of small children, but before the career 
part can really get off the ground--will find themselves inconveniently poor 
and optionless, but why let facts get in the way of a good cultural 
mythology?

Ah, well.  Back to the world of dreams.

Melynda Huskey

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