Really loved this conversation between Tyler Cowen and Camille Paglia. Some of my favorite gems:
Camille on music reminds me of second-wave technologyāwhen ambitious young people settle for building imitations following waves instead of their instincts:
Itās because our music industry is now very formulaic. Young people canāt really move along studying their instruments and getting their chops over a period of time. Thereās nothing to draw on in the way that the musicians of my generation could draw on the folk tradition, the folk music.
Iām just saying thereās certain moments, certain magic moments, of fertility or creativity that happened in many of the arts. You can find certain key moments where thereās a confluence of influences and a certain richness. In that very moment, itās a great time to be alive, to be young.
For example, Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare if he were alive today. As it happens, he left Stratfordāāāfor whatever reasonāāāwent to London at a magic moment when theater was flourishing, which was only for a few decades, and then it was out again. Thereās a certain kind of luck. If youāre the right person at the right time in any one of the artistic genres.
The fiction writers are off in another world. They donāt see the world as it exists now. They donāt use the language of the contemporary world. Their English is utterly stale and cloistered. I cannot read a page of contemporary fiction, Iām sorry. Anything thatās preācontemporary fiction, Iām a great admirer of. Believe me, these are the kind of books Iāll open like this and like that.
On the erosion of masculinity:
Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. Thereās absolutely no doubt about that. But, with that, comes static. So you have to have strong women in order to deal with masculine men.
That is why masculinity is constantly being eroded, diminished, and dissolved on university campuses because it allows women to be weak. If you have weak men, then you can have weak women. Thatās what we have. Our university system, anything that is remotely masculine is identified as toxic, as intrinsic to rape culture. A utopian future is imagined where there are no men. Weāre all genderless mannequins.
Thatās how I became a feminist before feminism had revived, because I suddenly discovered this period just after women had won the right to vote. In the 1920s and ā30s, we had all these career women, like Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, Clare Boothe Luce. Thereās so many women, Margaret Bourke-White.
By the time second-wave feminism revived, which was with Betty Friedanās cofounding of NOW in 1967, I was out of sync with them. When suddenly they revived, began complaining about men, and all that stuff, so on and so forth, I hated it. It was early clashes that I had with those feminists from the start. I tried to join second-wave feminism. They wouldnāt have me because I would not bad mouth men.
These women, like Amelia Earhart, they did not bad mouth men. They admired men. They admired what men had done. What they said was, āWe demand equal opportunity for women,ā which gave us the opportunity to show that we can achieve at the same level as men who did all these great things.
