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ed_rex'Academic' means never having to speak the obvious
 Camille Paglia, date and photographer unknown. |
I see the one-time enfant terrible of the American Academy, Camille Paglia hasn't entirely disappeared since she decided not to complete the second volume of Sexual Personae some time during the 1990s.
Writing in the 25 June edition of the New York Times on the FDA's rejection of a drug to "treat" "female sexual desire disorder", Paglia goes on at some length to discuss "the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country" despite "a media environment drenched in sex."
Paglia wonders rhetorically, "...to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?" but the answer is never much in doubt and has little to do with anyone's anxiety, "overachieving" or otherwise.
No, "[t]he real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety." "Victorian prudery" gets a ritual (ahem) spanking, Shakespeare a scholarly nod and soon the "priggish 1950s" usher in a return to the (repressed and repressive) norm with only a weak rear-guard fight for sexual liberation engaged in by "the diffuse New Age movement".
But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.
Reading through the dense and mannered academese, it seems men have been emasculated by a brave, new androgynous world of business, and a super-feminine environment at home, in which men "are simply cogs", presumably employed in cooking half the meals and changing half the diapers, all at the commands of the women in their lives.
If, at about the half-way point of the essay, it is unclear just what this all has to do with the alleged epidemic outbreak of female frigidity, the next paragraph explains it all.
"[V]isually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife" and the sexes "are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left."
Paglia goes on to blame Hollywood's love of unromantic nudity, its unreal objectifications of female ideals of beauty (too skinny, too muscular, too busty, depending on which paragraph you're looking at); to praise black and latino ideals of feminine beauty; country music's "raunchy scenarios"; and to disparage current trends in rock and roll and other enervated forms of pop culture before declaring that "[p]harmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra" because "inhibitions are stubbornly internal. And lust is too fiery to be left to the pharmacist."
And who knows? A closer reading of Paglia's sloppy thinking and worse writing might reveal a nugget or three of sociological insight, but meanwhile ...
Meanwhile, it never seems to have occurred to Paglia that Americans, men and women both have been (when they haven't been under- or un-employed) working ever-longer hours over the past few decades, even as their wages have stagnated, their schools and neighbourhoods and roads have deteriorated and, over the last decade, their very sense of physical safety has undergone a steady assault of terror alerts and threats of more wars that the two already being fought.
In short, an awful lot of Americans are an awful lot more tired and more stressed than they were in the halcyon days of Paglia's youth.
And yet somehow, it never occurs to Paglia to wonder — presuming there is any truth to the pharmaceutical and medical establishments' claims that there is a general problem with the American woman's libido — if it might be possible women are just tired, that old-fashioned stress is at the heart of the "problem"?
"Honey, I have a headache" may often be an excuse, but "Honey, I'm tired" can very often be an all-too real reason for losing that lovin' feeling.
Cross-posted from Edifice Rex Online and adapted from my original posting, below.
I see the one-time enfant terrible of the American Academy, Camille Paglia hasn't entirely disappeared since she decided not to complete the second volume of Sexual Personae some time during the 1990s.
Writing in the 25 June edition of the New York Times in response to an article about the FDA's rejection of a drug to "treat" "female sexual desire disorder", Paglia goes on at some length to discuss "the sexual malaise that appears to have sunk over the country" despite "a media environment drenched in sex."
Paglia rhetorically wonders, "...to what extent do these complaints about sexual apathy reflect a medical reality, and how much do they actually emanate from the anxious, overachieving, white upper middle class?" but the answer is never much in doubt.
"The real culprit, originating in the 19th century, is bourgeois propriety." "Victorian prudery" gets a ritual (ahem) spanking, Shakespeare a scholarly nod and the "priggish 1950s" usher in a return to the (repressed and repressive) norm with a weak rear-guard fight for sexual liberation engaged by "the diffuse New Age movement".
But concrete power resides in America’s careerist technocracy, for which the elite schools, with their ideological view of gender as a social construct, are feeder cells.In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.
Meanwhile, family life has put middle-class men in a bind; they are simply cogs in a domestic machine commanded by women. Contemporary moms have become virtuoso super-managers of a complex operation focused on the care and transport of children. But it’s not so easy to snap over from Apollonian control to Dionysian delirium.
Reading through the dense and mannered academese, it seems men have been emasculated by a brave, new androgynous world in which men "are simply cogs" in a world machine run by women. At roughly the mid-way point of the essay, just what this has to do with the alleged outbreak of female frigidity is unclear, but the next paragraph explains it all.
Men are boyishly frumpy — "visually, American men remain perpetual boys, as shown by the bulky T-shirts, loose shorts and sneakers they wear from preschool through midlife" and the sexes "are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left."
Paglia goes on to blame Hollywood, which has forgotten about foreplay in favour of nudity, sexual depictions, unreal objectifications of contradictory female ideals (skinny, muscular, busty, depending on the paragraph), to praise black and latino ideals of feminine beauty, country music and to disparage current trends in rock and roll (etcetera), before declaring that "[p]harmaceutical companies will never find the holy grail of a female Viagra" because "inhibitions are stubbornly internal. And lust is too fiery to be left to the pharmacist."
And maybe that's so, what do I know?
But one thing never seems to have occurred to Paglia. Americans, men and women both, when they are not un- or under-employed, are working longer hours than they have in generations and, either way, are suffering from a great deal of economic anxiety.
Isn't it possible, if there is truth to the claim that American women are in need of a boost for their collective libido (and I suspect the same is true for most of the men who are using Viagra and its lesser-known cousins for an erotic boost and as a performance crutch), that old-fashioned stress is at the heart of the problem?
"Honey, I have a headache" may often be an excuse, but "Honey, I'm tired can very often be an all-too real reason for losing that lovin' feeling.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-07-01 05:15 pm (UTC)If living with a woman of equal earning power recduces a dood to man-boy-infant status, I think he already had an existant problem.
*headdesk*
Yet still, a grain of truth
Date: 2010-07-08 08:24 pm (UTC)It mostly applies to poorly-educated working-class men, of course, who can no longer earn a decent living through the (literal) sweat of the brows, but I think that many men and women alike (though probably more men) no longer feel as if they know what their roles in the world are.
There is a fading, but still massive, cultural inertia which says men are and behave thusly while women are and behave thisly.
So I think that Paglia is actually touching (barely) on a real phenomena. But she's also a reactionary and an "academic shithead", so just about everything she deals with becomes more complex and less true to the lived reality.
Or something like that. It's awfully hot just now ...
There is a lot of gender confusion out there. Men who once earned a living and supported a family through their physical strength suddenly find themselves out of work, or at least out of well-paying work.
and I suspect more so for men than for women, and probably more for working class men than for those from the middle class. Simply put, earning a living through the literal sweat of a man's brow used to be not just an honourable way to support oneself and one's family, it used to be a pretty lucrative one, as well.
And for people
Rebuttal
Date: 2010-07-09 03:00 pm (UTC)In my opinion, the argument of the male rendered ineffective by women entering the workforce is misrepresented at its core. It perpetuates the myth of the ideal middle class family unit which never actually existed. First, let me start by saying that the middle class is a fairly recent development in Western society. When it rose to semi-prominence in the 19th century it allowed for upper class ideals to be transposed onto more families. Men as breadwinner, women stay at home. This was significant of status, the woman had the luxury to stay home.
But the bulk of our society has never been able to afford this life style. Women have always been a major part of the work force. As farmers, servants, maids, cooks, seamstresses, prostitutes, artists, and with the onset of the industrial age – factory laborers. They were a driving force in the efforts to unionize at the end of the 19th century (ironically). African American women have played a major role in the workforce first as slaves and then also after the Civil War; this doesn’t necessarily hold true for the first generation of Chinese Americans (foot binding). But it certainly holds true for Native American women who were raised in white, Christian schools specifically designed for them to learn a domestic trade.
The difference in the last century is not the influx of women workers, it is the increased education and recognition of them as workers. If there is evidence that middle class American men are suffering an identity crisis I would wager it is in direct correlation to the increase in women’s rights. Not in women’s ability to work. Women have always worked and earned. And the current generation of men are in no way the first to have encountered that. In the 19th century, especially, the masses of working poor included mothers, fathers, and children. Many of whom labored side by side in the same awful factories. But functioning at the level of survival, no one cared who provided for the family, it had to be a joint effort.
If men feel threatened I believe it is because the idea of shared status as threat is still within this generation. I work with an elderly faculty member who remembers a time when nurses had to stand when a doctor entered the room. They no longer have to defer in that fashion. Any more then a modern wife has to get permission from her husband to open a checking account or get a credit card (as my grandmother did).
Paglia definitely knows better.
Re: Rebuttal
Date: 2010-07-10 07:23 pm (UTC)Hug appreciated, but not necessary; I actually quite enjoy a good debate in my journal (or elsewhere). But onwards.
You're quite right about the historical reality of women in the paid work-force, but I think that kind of side-steps the psychological reality that upper-class mores very often speak to middle- and working-class aspirations.
And more, in post-War North America especially, those aspirations became a reality for a very broad swath of the population. When I wrote my first response, I was thinking of Sudbury, a mining community of about 100,000 people in Northern Ontario.
My family moved there was I was about 8 years old, 1972 or 1973. At the time, there were close to 20,000 workers in the mines and the related industries. Very nearly 100% of whom were men.
Men who, on a single income, could support a family, send the kids to school, own their own home plus a cottage and buy a new car every few years.
For close to three decades, that was the reality for the unionized working-class in much of North America.
But now? I said there were almost 20,000 miners at INCO and Falconbridge in 1973? The number is now something under 4,000, and shrinking all the time as new and more efficient technologies come online.
Now, of course, with the massive decline in unionization and in the power of the unions still around, in most cases it takes (at least) two working-class incomes to achieve that material standard of living.
And for the sort of men who once proudly dropped out of high school and yet still managed to be "a man" according to the upper-class 19th century template, the new world has got to be a confusing and painful place.
But of course, Paglia isn't even interested in the working class, so all of this is kind of a digress — and I don't think I've really addressed your points, have I?
Re: Rebuttal
Date: 2010-07-10 07:41 pm (UTC)I said that for 3 or so decades following the end of the Second World War, the upper-class myths seemed to be coming true for the middle and working classes as well, but that since then, the economic climate has changed, and has hit working class men especially hard.
You suggested, above, that, "The difference in the last century is not the influx of women workers, it is the increased education and recognition of them as workers."
Are you sure about that? My impression is that, while a lot of (working class) women worked outside the home, they did so in a very narrow set of fields. Domestic service, teaching, low-end (read: extremely oppressive) assembly-lines, etc. For the comfortable working classes and the middle classes, men (hell, white men, for that matter!) had very close to a monopoly on skilled trades, on the professions, academia, etc.
That only changed with feminism and the generation of women who had had a taste of independence during the War and who didn't like being shoved back into the house when it was over. And that (along with people of colour getting sick and tired of being pushed to the back of the bus) meant a big influx in the number of workers in a whole raft of fields which had at one time been the exclusive purview of white men.
Which (as any good Marxist will tell you) has, along with globalization, has helped to depress wages.
(I'm not, by the way, suggesting that feminism or minority rights are bad things, only that some of the consequences have created real conflicts, as any and every change will.)
But functioning at the level of survival, no one cared who provided for the family, it had to be a joint effort.
Which is where I think Paglia (to get back to her, for a moment!) is completely missing the boat. The kind of economic desperation that was once the "privilege" of the working poor has become a middle-class phenomenon — and no wonder people (men and women!) are having problems with their collective libido!
If men feel threatened I believe it is because the idea of shared status as threat is still within this generation.
I don't think we're very far apart on this. However, I think that men are threatened in fact. The mistake lies in blaming the women in their lives (whether personal or working) for the failures of an economic system which goes into crisis mode because it is too good at making things.
The world's ecology aside, we ought to be living in a golden age of leisure and comfort; instead, we are living in a time of great stress and fearfulness, in which those with jobs must work ever harder to keep them, because there are so many willing to take their place for less money and fewer benefits.