Really loved this conversation between Tyler Cowen and Camille Paglia. Some of my favorite gems:
Camille on music reminds me of second-wave technology—when ambitious young people settle for building imitations following waves instead of their instincts:
It’s because our music industry is now very formulaic. Young people can’t really move along studying their instruments and getting their chops over a period of time. There’s nothing to draw on in the way that the musicians of my generation could draw on the folk tradition, the folk music.
I’m just saying there’s certain moments, certain magic moments, of fertility or creativity that happened in many of the arts. You can find certain key moments where there’s a confluence of influences and a certain richness. In that very moment, it’s 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 Stratford — for whatever reason — went to London at a magic moment when theater was flourishing, which was only for a few decades, and then it was out again. There’s a certain kind of luck. If you’re the right person at the right time in any one of the artistic genres.
The fiction writers are off in another world. They don’t see the world as it exists now. They don’t use the language of the contemporary world. Their English is utterly stale and cloistered. I cannot read a page of contemporary fiction, I’m sorry. Anything that’s pre–contemporary fiction, I’m a great admirer of. Believe me, these are the kind of books I’ll open like this and like that.
On the erosion of masculinity:
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.
That’s 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 ’30s, we had all these career women, like Amelia Earhart, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Thompson, Clare Boothe Luce. There’s so many women, Margaret Bourke-White.
By the time second-wave feminism revived, which was with Betty Friedan’s 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 wouldn’t 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, “We demand equal opportunity for women,” which gave us the opportunity to show that we can achieve at the same level as men who did all these great things.
