Monday, May 2, 2016

Are universities eroding masculinity?

Camille Paglia on gender and masculinity.
The problem right now is that the masculine has no honor whatever in our culture. We’re in a period now where young people are being processed for the universities, and the gender norms are said to be that gender is a construct. It is simply the product of environmental pressures on people. There’s no nothing in the body — .
COWEN: We have a big culture. Not everyone goes to university, thank goodness. You can go to a NASCAR race and a few of the people there have not been to the Ivy Leagues.
PAGLIA: Working class culture retains an idea of the masculine. There’s 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. That’s 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. We’re all genderless mannequins.
The movie The Time Machine is like one. We’re moving toward that, the Eloi. That’s how I see the upper middle class graduates of the Ivy League. They’re the Eloi.

2 comments:

  1. You might like this take on the issue:
    http://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2016/05/masculinity-is-not-about-women.html

    It made sense to me.

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  2. Eloi - yes

    the Eloi only ate fruit.

    "modern" humans - most of them - given naught to eat but a live chicken - would starve to death

    that brings to mind an experience I had in the military - wore a steel pot helmet - given an undressed chicken, a rattlesnake, rice and a few vegetables

    expected, required, to prepare and consume them - build a fire, cook in helmet - no big deal made of it



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