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The Provocations of Camille Paglia

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Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#51

Post by ryan-allen »

9nGQluzmnq3M wrote: post #27
pjc50 wrote: post #24

But that's assuming the conclusion! The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. The roles we play and the relationships we have with each other aren't a mere clockwork expression of our chromosomes. They are far more memetic instead. You can't point to a spot on the Y chromosome that is responsible for unequal pay. Edit: I know it's frowned on to compla…

Oh yes you can: men have testosterone, so they're more aggressive, which turns out to translate to asking for more pay raises more often and changing jobs more quickly if unhappy with their pay. Hey presto, a biological basis for unequal pay. Now obviously this doesn't explain everything about unequal pay -- but it would be foolish to ignore entirely, no?

Apparently this is a topic you're not allowed to talk about, even if you can prove it empirically.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#52

Post by macspoofing »

wickedsickeune wrote: post #48
macspoofing wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny That's the whole point? Because I think this is the sentiment of pretty much every rational person, and heck, every non-rational person. Nobody argues biology is destiny. Even the most stringent materialists won't argue that physics or chemistry or biology is the best way to understand interactions between people. This is why biologists don't…

> No. But we can do in depth economic analysis. And in fact, we can explain unequal pay quite well, and it has very little to do with discrimination. Because I'm really interested in this and have been unable to find something convincing, could you point me towards any such studies?

Fair warning, this topic has been beaten to death and is now radioactive and everyone has settled in their tranches. But just Google around and you'll find tons of resources, though the wikipedia page[1] has a good overview of some of the subtleties, and some good examples (the recent Uber study is referenced on the page). And the fact that there are deep, nuanced, subtleties that require context to properly digest shows you that activists are really dishonest whenever they make shallow claims of wage discrimination.

For the sake this next example, grant me that difference in wages is due to life choices, even in that case, you can reach a state where things are, on the surface, unfair, like for example the fact that the pension will be greater for men than for women (or vice versa if we're talking about a female dominated field). You can take a shallow view and look at the raw numbers and assert bigotry. But that misses something, because it isn't quite the same as a government having a policy where, even when all things are equal, women get a low pension rate.

Almost every single explanation or example has this kind of nuance. It is almost never the case that someone just decided that Jane should make less than Bob because he's a man and she's a woman (though I'm sure in a country of 350 million, you can find plenty examples of that too). Furthermore, no company, and no government department has policies on the books that mandate one gender should be paid more than the other, and in fact they all have policies to disallow that - which really cuts against the claim of systematization (how can it be systematic if everyone is actively against it).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#53

Post by wtdata »

pjc50 wrote: post #23
grey-area wrote: post #14

Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our a…

Camille Paglia is also a global warming denier, which is the sort of error that should give you cause to not only doubt everything she says but to use her as a contrarian indicator.

Wolfgang Pauli deeply believed in the occult and Isaac Newton in alchemy and biblical interpretations.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#54

Post by qazpot »

sprafa wrote: post #36

Peterson lost a lot of credibility for me when he took a group selfie with some guys with a big Pepe The Frog flag. I mean it’s kind of funny but 90% of the Pepe memes are actually racist and horrible (from what I’ve seen). After that I couldn’t take his alt-right denialism very seriously. It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.

So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#55

Post by coldtea »

pjc50 wrote: post #50
coldtea wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole point of gender studies is the idea that biology is not destiny, especially in social interaction. No, that's a modern fashionable idea IN gender studies. Doesn't mean all gender studies should (or does) bow to this idea. And even when they do, it's far more nuanced than that, as there's an interplay between biology and social elements. (Paglia doesn't say biology is destiny itself -- but parts of biology…

> parts of biology ARE destiny -- for example, death is Substantial parts of HN think this is something that could be rectified technologically. And there are a few species that are "biologically immortal"; lobsters don't have telomere aging, for example.

>Substantial parts of HN think this is something that could be rectified technologically.

Well, until they manage to rectify that, it is. I will update the comment when that happens (assuming it's not so far in the future that me and those substantial parts of HN are all dead, in which case it wont matter).

>And there are a few species that are "biologically immortal"; lobsters don't have telomere aging, for example.

Good for them, but still not applicable to humans as of yet (or at any point in our past).

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#56

Post by sterlind »

rvn1045 wrote: post #19
grey-area wrote: post #14

Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our a…

I’m not that familiar with her work. But my understanding is that when disciplines like gender studies were being formed they completely ignored biology and nature.in fact there were no biologists in the gender studies departments. And she was one of the first people to suggest that we must study gender with a basis in biology. This is what she may be referencing in the passage you quoted.

Gender studies did indeed start out this way, dismissive of notions of "biological sex," until the case of David Reimer threw a bucket of cold water on those second-wave feminist theories. David was the victim of a botched circumcision as an infant. His doctors decided to turn an outie into an innie, constructed a vagina, and told his parents to raise him as a woman. He was given "vitamin" pills (actually estrogen) and forcibly socialized as female, but it didn't take. He identified as male throughout his life, transitioned as an adult, eventually discovered the truth his parents were hiding and finally killed himself.

This was an early factor in third-wave feminism accepting gender identity, which is why almost all millenial and gen-Z feminists accept trans and intersex people and why TERFs tend to be older (or deceased, good riddance Janice Raymond.)

I've found that the left tends to distrust science that may contradict its ideology, and the right tends to distrust experiences too alien from their own. In Reimer's case, the science had a human tragedy at the center of it which bridged the gap and led to change.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#57

Post by namirez »

Animats wrote: post #5

“These minor French theorists have had a disastrous effect on American education. Lacan encourages pompous bombast and Foucault teaches cheap cynicism, while Derrida’s aggressive method, called deconstruction, systematically trashes high culture by reducing everything to language and then making language destroy itself.” She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.

>She's right, but it really upsets many academics for someone to say that. Good.

Is it "good" just because it upsets academics? Is she "right" just because you agree with her? To me, her comment sounds like a very uncharitable critique of those writers.

I'm not a fan of Derrida or Lacan, but I've noticed they get a lot of criticism from people who've never read them. They were not necessarily original thinkers with revolutionary ideas, but they definitely offered some new insights.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#58

Post by FabHK »

grey-area wrote: post #14

Camille Paglia is over-rated IMO. I've read a couple of her books and there is little of substance there under the gnomic bombast and pseudo-academic jargon. An example from the start of her most famous book: In the beginning was nature. The background from which and against which our ideas of god were formed, nature remains the supreme moral problem. We cannot hope to understand sex and gender until we clarify our a…

FWIW, I find Paglia's passage you quoted much more intelligible than Lacan or Derrida's notoriously impenetrable prose, and find it surprising and actually disingenuous that you'd accuse her of "bombast and pseudo-academic jargon" when that's a charge that can very much be laid at the feet of the postmodernists. I mean, there are literally books about it, such as Sokal and Bricmont's Intellectual Impostors (or Fashionable Nonsense in the US).

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#59

Post by sprafa »

qazpot wrote: post #54
sprafa wrote: post #36

Peterson lost a lot of credibility for me when he took a group selfie with some guys with a big Pepe The Frog flag. I mean it’s kind of funny but 90% of the Pepe memes are actually racist and horrible (from what I’ve seen). After that I couldn’t take his alt-right denialism very seriously. It’s a shame because I actually think some of his talks are quite good.

So you disregard a person's all opinions only because he took a selfie with bunch of people and a cartoon character and the 90% of the said cartoon character's memes you have seen are racist and horrible.

Ah well if you see the selfie you might change your mind.

But yes.

The main thing for me was I rarely if ever see Peterson smile. And in this photo he’s grinning ear to ear.

Re: The Provocations of Camille Paglia

#60

Post by FabHK »

simonh wrote: post #12

Paglia is a force of nature. It's so exhilarating to come across such a passionate yet clear-sighted academic, battle scarred by exposure of her past misconceptions to the brutality of testing in the real world, and with such a stronger voice for it. I know he's just as much of a divisive figure, but there's a great video of a conversation between Paglia and Jordan Peterson on Youtube.

Agreed - Peterson has some important things to say, and much nonsense, but that specific conversation is absolutely hilarious, by virtue of her hyperbolic and rambling, but fun excursions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-hIVnmUdXM

https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/podcast/episode-31/

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