Credit to Ibertaux for giving a more concrete comment than I am able to.

I haven’t noticed this. Most of the complaints I’ve seen about her seem to come from feminists.

For the record, I’m male and I’m a Paglia fan. One thing I like about her is that, just like her, I am spiritually aligned with liberals and progressives on most things but I also reserve most of my criticism for them. Like Paglia I’m an iconoclast.

I also agree with her on religion – I’m not the least bit religious but as an artist I recognize the value it has in stimulating an artistic appreciation for the ineffable, a sense of awe and wonder. My major artistic influences are the late Renaissance and Baroque, EVEN when my subject happens to be a female nude with piercings.

Another thing I like about her is that she recognizes and respects the power of the erotic and the sexual as the animating force that it is in art and culture. It’s probably on that count that she has taken the most flack, especially from feminists and conservatives.

The “I’’s don’t bother me. She does have a stuttery staccato delivery-not really stuttering..does not bother me either. The excessive labeling did catch my attention. BUT as Steven sort of points out she is equal-opportunity in her criticism-she is trying to negotiate -to bring opposing views closer. At the moment we are stuck in these categories- she accepts them and goes from there. The alternative is to deny they exist.

Maybe Steven is right, this may be the wrong cultural moment for this “schtick” – OR maybe it is exactly the right one.

There are almost 700 responses to her cirst column at Salon.com BTW!

Better clarify. By “taking [them]…seriously” I mean *giving their worldviews equal time or consideration*. Certainly, these figures from the Right have to be taken as seriously as one would take a loaded gun or a rabid pitbull.

“I just don’t understand the animus that Paglia evokes…”

Well, I think Paglia chose the wrong cultural moment to indulge in her non-partisanship schtick, for one thing; while Dems vs Reps is a false dichotomy (both sides are now phenomena of the right), the battle to rescue democratic principles (and life on earth itself) is very much Left vs Right, since the Right have proven themselves to be a shockingly destructive force. Flamboyant displays of “open mindedness” are not at the moment appreciated if being “open minded” means taking certain figures from the for-all-intents-and-purposes “evil” Right seriously. Ditto with “religion”, that source of so very little 21st century good and so very much blood and misery.

I think some academics are able to handle a brief dip in the limelight (Sontag springs to mind) relatively well, while others are somewhat deranged by it. Not being French, I’m not sure if BHL’s taste of pop has had the affect on him that it seems to have had on Paglia (she sometimes seems to betray the bizarre fear that teenage boys will find her irrelevant; *of course* they’ve never heard of her) but I wouldn’t be surprised.

I just don’t understand the animus that Paglia evokes, mostly from males I notice. I could be wrong about that observation. Any ideas? I think it’s rather irrational. It’s not based on her ideas… not really. The complaints about her are about her persona and that she is not original in what she is saying( which I disagree about). Also- and this is true- she is contradictory or inconsistant. ( I can live with that…) I don’t need her to be consistant. Stimulating, thought provoking is enough. She has her head stuck in pop culture and she has thoughts about it and I don’t.

Ann and I are *very* close…”she” allows me to take credit for this one. Okay?

“At the Popeye’s drive-through (where I was ordering Cajun wings), I blurted in agitation to the window lady, “Anna Nicole Smith just dropped dead — tell everyone!” — which she promptly did. The staff inside (all African-American) were startled and incredulous.”

—And then the minimum-wage-earning, grease-stained, bottom-feeding, disenfranchised, reviled, ridiculed, uneducated and unwelcome members of America’s congenital slavery-spawned underclass were so moved by your boundary-crossing gesture of pop-swill solidarity that they sang a gospel song of transcendance and redemption for the dead fat drug-saturated talent-free redneck cock-sucking white lady, right?

“…it was Sean Hannity’s lively show that tipped me off to the Code Pink video with Hillary. And Rush Limbaugh, who fathered the radio boom, features Paul Shanklin’s brilliant parodies — such as his recent, full-throated version of Lerner and Loew’s song ‘They Call the Wind Maria’ (pronounced ‘Mar-eye-ah’), which became John Kerry singing ‘They Call the U.S. Pariah.’ I was in stitches.”

—Because you’re so fair-mindedly non-partisanly above it all that you aren’t *nauseated* by the very voices of the venal, creepy, napalm-smooth cheerleaders of a slime-drenched cannibal/vampire junta responsible not only for hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths but also for the Stalinist zeitgeist of modern American ‘life’, and debasement of the notions of truth, freedom of speech and justice in the West, meanwhile destabilizing doomsday flashpoints around the planet and inspiring a virulent anti-American bloodlust in the middle east it will take centuries to neutralize, right?

“Though I am a professed atheist, I have been arguing for 20 years that the study of world religions should be basic to the university core curriculum.”

—Because none of us sane, enlightenment-tutored agnostics have been through enough of a hideous flaming shitstorm of life-hating, pleasure-damning, terroristic onslaughts and cultural fallout from zealots of every possible nutjob Darwin-denying, woman-stoning, infidel-decapitating, child-shooting, nigger-hanging, abortion-clinic-bombing stripe for the past sixty years so we need it all rubbed in our faces as an institutionally-validated view of reality, right?

You’re so COOL, you out-of-touch, phony, desperate-for-attention (and relevance) pseudo-intellectual yuppie muff-munching harpy shill!

(Is *that* what you wanted to hear?)

BTW, it’s spelled “ciao“

Ma dai. Many Italians sign off their e-mails and SMS just as herbertbrowne did. “Chow mein” especially popular.

BTW, it’s spelled “ciao“

Potter, I wasn’t saying that she “had no experience- period”… that’s just silly. I was referring to her disclaimer about drugs (principally hallucinogens)… and the two of us allowing to have had some experience in that dept. That’s all…
As for Paglia, I find her as entertaining as Alice found the Red Queen- a whackin’ delight- as long as it’s not My head that she wants to cut off… and it isn’t, because I’M not promulgating post-modern, post-structuralism anywhere at all… not at all… no way… OK? chow ^..^

Once a newspaper touches a story, the facts are lost forever, even to the protagonists. – Norman Mailer

No question each member of the counter-culture had a different experience- there is no one telling.

In my view, drugs were used to help change consciousness, to “blow” the mind as Paglia reminds, ( as the music did ) and in a sense used religiously by some, but also self-destructively by others. There was much ego-destruction going on. I can’t imagine that some kids I ran into that were on amphetamines or heroine are still alive or, if they are, well- but who knows. Drugs were not a motivator- but an aid… up or down – depending where you were inclined to head. Taking a particular drug could be or was part of an initiation into the culture, the community. It was not a drug culture per se imo ( not all about drugs), though drugs were definitely a part of it. Drugs did bring about states of mind that were hard to arrive at quickly- and of course these states would leave just as quickly because the real inner work needed to be done. It did help break through and give vision. I disagree with Paglia that all is lost as I have said ( many moved inward to save themselves) but some – too many-got lost or destroyed by it.

The quest for impossible stats reminds me too much of the “Women at War” thread. I do not want to go there.

HG says (quoting pryoung?) : Paglia just appropriates a meme of the New Right—that “secular humanism” has been destroying America since the 1960’s—and adds scholarly flourishes to make polemic and posturing seem like maverick public intellectualism.

I can’t find that quote nor that sentiment. The pryoung quote I find is:

Camille Paglia: “But a totally secularized society with contempt for religion sinks into materialism and self-absorption and gradually goes slack, without leaving an artistic legacy.”

That is not the same. Paglia did say that both Right and Left have important criticisms.

ToHurley- Mottram’s book ( he is English and from that POV) seems tangential to this, the scope not on this subject, though he apparently uses the Dionysian analogy in his thesis. I have not read the book and there are no reviews or ratings on it at your link. Elsewhere this book is mentioned in passing not in direct connection with what we are speaking of here. I did come across an interesting piece, perhaps more relevant, in the hunt-it mentions Mottram in passing.

‘Go to the forest and move’: 1960s American Rock Music as Electronic Pastoral by David Ingram, Brunel University

Enhabit- thank you for the link to Dawkins interview with the Bishop.

http://www.glumbert.com/media/dawkinsbishop

In Eric Mottram’s selected essays, Blood on the Nash Ambassador, there’s an absolutely eerie examination of the killings at Altamont that sets them vividly in the Dionysian context Paglia refers to. I’d quote it but no longer have a copy. You can find one here:
http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Nash-Ambassador-Investigations-American/dp/0091823641/ref=sr_1_10/102-6832164-8772966?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176301929&sr=8-10

Anyone here have a line on it?