Camille Paglia Warns of the Great Leap Backwards
Welcome back to the grass huts.
Editor’s Note: This is part of an ongoing series at GOTD and our sister site
discussing the work and ideas of Camille Paglia. See the first installments here:In Chapter One of Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia says, “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts.” Currently, Germany is headed for the hut-life due its embrace of green energy after 2000 and their subsequent shutting down of their nuclear and coal industries. The expensive and unreliable wind and solar couldn’t keep up with modern life. The big blow came in 2022 when Russia closed the natural gas spigot and German authorities suggested its citizens start piling up firewood for the coming winter. Finally, the Germans were getting closer to Gaia’s green new deal.
Paglia knows that material progress has become associated with white western men, so a return to a “simpler” life, that is the goddess-girl life as imagined by progressives, endangers the astounding comfort and safety of our current lives. The white man’s ability to harness fossil fuels and bring air conditioning and heating and wholesome, nutritious foods within minutes of our homes, is not only taken for granted by the feminist/Gaia mindset, but actually hated. If this development appears suicidal, it’s because it is.
The Best Commercial of the Year Award might just go to an insurance ad where all the girls are smart and creative and considerate (and resemble RBG) and the guys are just imbeciles (The destroyer/creator goddess Kali is not on the corporate/feminist radar). By ending fossil fuels and man’s obsessive love of adventure, discovery, creation, and society, we return to what the very dead white guy Thomas Hobbes said about living in a state of nature: “Nasty, brutish and short.”
Paglia is on record saying the beauty of capitalism is that she can support herself sitting in front of a computer, writing, in the 21st century, benefiting from the capitalist system of distribution that makes goods and services a daily miracle that is unrivaled in all of human history.
In a Jordan Peterson interview, Paglia rightfully rails against a culture that would scoop up a young male-centered Camille to focus on a life of victimhood instead of allowing her to discover her own sexuality, pursue her own passions in life, such as her vast exploration of western art and culture.
Also, in the Peterson interview, she and Jordan talk of an EMP-style attack that would crash our present world returning us to a Hobbesian state of nature. Paglia says that it would be the men who would go out and risk their lives to string electrical lines, dig ditches, and build again the American infrastructure. She knows that it would be men doing the dangerous work, risking their lives in order to raise our beautiful, fossil-fueled way of life to its previous glory.
I think I question both the thesis of this article as it relates to Paglia's statements as well as Paglia's statement as a whole.
First off to address the thesis of the article. The only thing connecting Germany's dumb decision to shutdown it's nuclear power plants and it's even dumber decision to become dependent on Russian fossil fuels and Paglia's statement is that Angela Merkel was the head of state during that time. Since Germany is a liberal democracy this hardly counts as a woman making unilateral decisions, these decisions were not made in a vacuum by one person alone.
Secondly these decisions certainly did not resign Germany to "hut-living" and if you are to criticize these decisions you also have to give credit to the fact that Germany during this time period had quite a bit of growth and became arguably the most powerful country within the European Union.
It's not like Germany is now collapsing, in fact it's doing pretty well comparitively to other countries around the world. Think about all the men that made far worse decisions during this time period. Like ummm. Putin who invaded Ukraine, or the President of El Salvador who hilariously made BitCoin an official currency right before the crypto currency collapsed. Or the catastrophic economic decisions made by Maduro/Hugo Chavez leading to Venezuela going from a developed country to a developing one. Or all the Democratic backsliding done all over the world. All of this perpetrated by male leaders.
Then you have the statement itself or female leaders trying to return to "Gaia" or whatever. Did Catherine the Great or Queen Elizabeth do that to their countries? They seemed pretty ruthless.
I don't buy it the idea that women are all that much different than men when put in a place of power. There isn't much evidence that they are particularly different.
To your last point discussing that men would go out and do the hard work to restore power in case there was an attack the knocked out the electrical grid. This just speaks to divisions of labor that have developed over time not inherent bravery. Who over the years have taken on the task of giving birth, caring for children etc?
Excellent post! Anyway you might add link to that commercial you referenced in paragraph 3?