, vamps and tramps, new essays which came out in 1994, the birds a study of Alfred Hitchcock published by the british film institute. Great road burns, Camille Paglia reads 43 of the worlds best poems and glaring images of the books she was here last year with five years ago including a journey through art from egypt to star wars. She is here this evening with her seventh book, free women free men. Sex, gender feminism. A cycle selection of her most notable lectures on the subject. Her third essay collection will be out by year from this fall from pantheon, a publisher expense publishing her work since sexual persona. She was contributor for salon. Com, beginning with its debut issue in 1995, written numerous articles on art, literature, feminism, religion, education and politics or publication around the world. Its a pleasure to thank you all for being here and now please join me in welcoming back to seattle Camille Paglia. [applause] hello. I dont know which microphone to use first but a pleasure to be back in the beautiful city for the first time i came for a book tour here was 1992 and it was a thrill to come back to seattle. This is my seventh book and i had hoped it was going to be my third essay collection. Its been since 1994, my second one was published and ive written so many things all over the world, many important pieces on religion in history, culture and so on but my publisher thought that my pieces on sex, gender and feminism have been so prosthetic for the last 25 to 30 years and it was urgent to get now so we went forward with this book and its absolutely amazing how its almost like a tsunami of events in the culture. Things i wrote in my introduction to this book last summer when i wrote the introduction speak directly to this moment. My premier principles as a person and as a thinker are free thought and freespeech. I am truly a child of the 1960s in that respect. And i am totally opposed to any kind of curtailment of either of those two things for whatever laudable social causes anyone may thinks they have. My particular influences came from my experience in the mid1960s in college when i entered college in 1964. That spring, the Free Speech Movement at berkeley, mario savio is an enormous culture hero to me. In college my influences were heavily, is a great scandal at city lights bookshop in 1967, the obscenity trial, the arrest of the manager of City Lights Bookstore for selling obscene pollens. Allen ginsbergs howl, dish was a huge influence. Lenny bruce, who is the person who transformed the medium of comedy, standup comedy from merely gags in the vaudeville style to very satiric, acerbic but meaningful style of analysis of social problems. Lenny bruce is the one who made comedy politically and socially relevant. Lenny bruce was an equal opportunity offender. He went against both liberal and conservative chivalrous and the first thinker really had an enormous impact on me in that lesson was oscar wilde by chance in a secondhand bookstore in syracuse, i stumbled on a copy of the book, it was a british book called the grams of oscarwilde and it is Still Available , its the dover addition , they couldnt believe no one in the us recognize the word program so if they call it now the wit and humor of oscar wilde but he has many of his wonderful oneliners from his plays and writings, from his dinner table conversations in london , organized by topic. The nature of men and women, etc. Its just this skating uncompromising quality of oscar wildes thinking, it had a huge impact on me and then on college this was before the Gay Liberation movement, gay men, they were absolutely scathing and going against every possible social convention. It was making you wince about Polio Victims and so on. What happened to that, after stonewall, gay men have come increasingly recreational, hedonistic or they become very pc and politicize so all of a sudden they are part of the army for the control of speech but i think on the underground gay men are just as busy as ever. But then in college and graduate school i began to read also the influences on oscar wilde himself which would be baudelaire and marquis de sade who had been in prison for the way he defied convention. It wasnt that long before i was in college that it was the great file for obscenity in england, later chatterleys lover, a penguin book was brought up. On charges of insanity and when Penguin Books triumphed it was a great blow against the forces of censorship so thats what i have stood for and my particular way of federalism was suppressedfor many years. The, my feminism predates second wave feminism which was created by betty free dan with her cofounding of now in 1966. I was already a feminist because i was directly impacted by first wave feminism in the early 1960s, 1961 when i was 14 years old, i suddenly became obsessed with Amelia Ehrhardt after an article about yet another clue was found, whatever. And i embarked on almost 3 Year Research project in high school into Amelia Ehrhardt. I went to all kinds of places, i ransacked the old newspapers and the bowels of the Surgeons Library and also i was obsessed with Katharine Hepburn who i began to see on latenight tv. I was getting from catherine i did not realize where decades was the real flame of first wave feminism. It was her mother was the head of the connecticut womens suffrage organization, her aunt was also a campaigner for womens suffrage and campaign as a small child when it bloomed as a protest. Votes for women, etc. So i was getting his first impact of 1920s, 1930s after women had won the right to vote in 1920. And its, we wanted to reproduce in my book the actual cage from Newsweek Magazine in 1963, the letters to the editor where i was given the letters to the editor when the soviets launched natalie threshold into space, the first woman to enter space at a time when women were banned from the Space Program and i wrote a protest letter and i was 16 years old. This was before now was ever found. And i said that this happens, she went into space on the very anniversary, 35th anniversary of Amelia Ehrhardt flying the atlantic and i said its obvious miss ehrhardt in her quest for equal opportunity for american women remains to be one. I was already a feminist before all this happened in the late 1960s and i tried to join the Womens Movement, did not succeed because the Womens Movement had all kinds of preconceptions about thesuppression of speech. They were antirock n roll. Antiart, i go down the line. I wasnt one of the what you later would call process feminist so the 1970s for example, i love charlies angels. I love cosmopolitan magazine, i loved those covers and meanwhile the other feminist were occupying helen browns offices and wanting the whole magazine to be shut down. I love the bond girls, james bond girls, Ursula Andrus coming out of the water with white bikini and across the cost of a knife etc. , so i love the dallas cowboy cheerleaders. So theres no way i could be taken into the Womens Movement, i was drummed right out of it. Right from the start and i said oh, she was made and i said i was not made by betty free dan. As i say in the book, paper then did not create germane braille greer and australia and did not create me in upstate new york. Its about time people realize the transformations and women that happened very radically in the mid20th century are not entirely due to the Womens Movement. I show in the introduction to this book how many things preceded the creation of man. Diana ray, and the avengers was in a black leather suit before now. Doing all that stuff. Betty free dan didnt create her either. I dont want tosidetrack. Wait. Let me, i have a certain amount of time here. Let me, all right. What happened was madonna. Madonna was so important. The way madonna is behaving now its such an embarrassment caused the current madonna bears no resemblance to the pioneering madonna of the 1980s and 90s but she will live forever for what she did. Her prosex feminist movement of the 1990s was made possible by madonnas trifling with pornography and exposure of the body and her brilliant videos of the 80s and 90s. I believe they are works of art. Her. Of 1983 and 1982 and i periodically do show some of those videos like vote and open your heart and so on and these are truly works of art. At any rate, all of a sudden its long silent swing of feminism, the prosex wing , the first course in the 1990s was feminist for free expression. I was aligned with and i appeared in events within the 1990s. We were fighting against the horrible scourge of Political Correctness and suppression of free speech during the 1980s and the antiporn movement led by Catherine Mackinnon and andrea dworkin. The next. By including in this book, what i think is my classic attack on them. I call them the reverse of carrie nation. And those women , they wrote an ordinance which was indeed adopted by minneapolis and indianapolis to to shut down even the sale of mens magazines. Like playboy and penthouse. On the grounds that supposedly pornography cause violence against women, cause rate, cause murder. These women are deranged, truly drained women but they ruled 1987 is in. Then thanks to madonna by prosex they rose up. And it also was helped along by the elliptic lesbians of san francisco. It became sort of black leather lesbians and so on and then we Went National and i thought now weve won, theres no problem so i kind of retired from speaking in 1994. After being out there with fisticuffs for a number of years and i went back to what i do. I wrote books on movies, Alfred Hitchcock and the birds. I wrote a book on poetry, a book on the visual arts and right now ive been or nine years involved researching native American Culture of the northeast, thats what im doing but i have to be, now i have to go back on the road. 23 years later i have to return. All of a sudden weve gone full circle again and this horrible scourge of Political Correctness is back. Even worse, we have people rioting and smashing windows at berkeley, the capital of the Free Speech Movement and so on so here i am again. I am not happy about it. Id rather be doing my native american research. Now, adults are here. How much time do i have . How many minutes do i have . 10 more minutes, good. So now a number of things. First of all im calling for, the title of my book which is free women, free men, im calling for an end to the sex war in feminism. Women are well lost now to this kind of reflects, putdowns of men. This has got to stop. I noticed wherever i go in the world that uppermiddleclass career women are very unhappy. Even though theyve achieved a certain status, what im saying is feminists have to stop blaming men for their own but the do i believe to you system changes that women for thousands of years, women have their own world. There was the world of women and there was the world of men and the sexes didnt have that much to do with each other. This is a brandnew experiment to have this new system where now women can be economically independent now. There no longer dependent on father or husband or brother for their sustenance but theyre working sidebyside with men in the workplace. This is an experiment. Its never happened before. What im saying in the book that is that we may have to accept a certain amount of tension to the sexes in the workplace. Its a feminist idea that we if we just suppress men enough, women will be happy. I say no. I say and its on the basis of my own experience as a child, and Italian American immigrant community that women have lost the old solidarity they once had when they totally ruled the private sphere. Womens lives all day long with was with other women, multigenerational, older women as well as the children. It was a huge tribal experience and now what women are feeling is a sense of isolation and loneliness, disconnection from their old function. Im not saying to go back, thats not what im saying. Im saying stop blaming men. These marches, the women were exhilarated. I dont think it had anything to do with feminism or antitrunk or anything like that. It was that women finally felt that surge of happiness again for being with other women. You can actually see it in the odyssey when odysseus is washed up naked and alone, on the shores of pfizer and he wakes to the sound of womens voices laughing and singing and so on. Is the princess going down to do the laundry on the shore and that is exactly what was going on up until fairly recently where women were all together. They did all the chores together. They did the laundry, they did the cooking. I remember this from my childhood in endicott new york. The immigrant italian women, mygrandparents plus my mother were born in italy and i have experience. It was an experience that went on for thousands of years in the agrarian area. My mother described as a small child in italy how all the women would get together to do the laundry and go up the hill to the osorio which was a fountain cut out of the side of the mountain, probably went backthousands of years. She remembered the singing, the picnicking, etc. So even though people were laboring physically in these agrarian eras there was a happiness, a sense of identity. There was no. For identity. Now is no place for an independent thinker. You have no options as a woman except to become anun i know , i know i would have been on 100 years ago. I know. Obviously communities are intellectually oppressive in their own way. Nevertheless, were in a period of quest for identity, tremendous pressure, on young people to formtheir own identity , except for those old automatic tribal affiliations but i think theres a tremendous, as a classroom teacher of now, more than 40 years i can see this and its really, theres a tremendous sense of logical location among young people and may find many ways to try to achieve some sort of identity and part of it course is social media which is causing this total entropy in terms of ability to reason and read and write, the whole thing. Now, im also calling for an end to this insanity of excluding biology from gender studies. How in the world did this happen . How did womens studies and gender studies and a teaching about gender withoutany reference what ever to biology or to hormones . And right now poststructuralism dominates gender studies everywhere. I didnt, i spent six months writing my deception of foucault, 27 years ago, and assignments, hello that anyone who thinks that foucault is somehow, the master of the universe has clearly not read my exposure of him in junk bonds incorporators. The man was a fraud. Im sorry. Compared to freud , freud is out and foucault is in. Poststructuralist, posed as leftists. But what were they doing in the past few decades with this crazy terror comparison growth of this administrator master class that had taken over the university. In a period of obscene rise in tuition costs. Student debt, this crippling families, where were these great leftists in our college campuses, where they resisting the administrators . Were they denouncing student debt . Were they lamenting the plight of adjunct teachers and so on . No, theyre all running to conferences talking about foucault. They thought that leftism . These poststructuralist are the worst mercenary careerists in this country. The leading poststructuralist and new historicists are retiring as multimillionaires, in a post leftists, it is a scandal. Forget foucault for heaven sakes. Thats absurd so we have to bring biology and authentic study of you know, of medicine, of anthropology, of history back into gender studies, thats one thing im calling for. Aside from these things, under on the warpath against bureaucracy of the campuses. At Benson College my first job in the 1970s, in 1976 we had uprising as faculty against the trustees and the administrators and the president of the college and it was a huge publicized, nora efron went up there and i wrote it up for us magazine. The faculties are totally castrated. What are they doing . The fact that faculties have been marginalized in this country. Theres this administrative master class, the administrators who are in league with federal mandates, federal authorities in washington. We are living in an age of stalinism right now and yet again, leftists caught talking the talk, but they do nothing about what really matters which is demand that your 50 percent reduction in the number of administrators and also 75 percent reduction in their salary which often exceeds that of the faculty members. We should realize how many of the ills that im decrying about suppression of speech on campus are coming from the administrators who are these social welfare dogooders. Oscar wilde was absolutely saving on these humanitarians , these aggressive aggressive philanthropist who dominated the victorian period. Okay, i have a feeling you were looming there. All right, at any rate in terms of all the things inthe , theres the reprints of what i consider an important piece of mine in Time Magazine where i call for the end of this outrageous age 21 law in the United States where young people cannot buy a beer. Nowhere in the world except in very repressive regimes, like the United Arab Emirates and so on, is it anything like that . What mothers against drunk driving. What basically wandered into an area here that has been extremely descriptive. When that was passed 1984, what do young people do to unable now to drink . They began taking the club drugs. Ecstasy and ketamine and all this crap that they take into their bodies and what happened to the ability of young people to go to a bar, to learn how to drink in a sensible way, in an adult context, to set with the opposite sex. Learn how to talk, how to flirt. Discuss ideas. And it has absolutely a cruel law, no one has raised. You can buy marijuana in colorado and young people get a glass of beer when they arrive in college, you know how outrageous that is . Im more outraged. That has to end. What else here . Okay. Lets see. Oh, i have quite a few things. Oh yes, so just to return to what i was saying about the the solidarity of women in the agrarian period, i think that probably part of my ability to analyze things comes from my exposure to almost a kind of capsule condensed version of Human History. I experienced those in an era through my contact with those most powerful country women of who had emigrated and theresa whole piece in my book about southern women , about the power of the rural paradigm in the strength of women southern women but we were a whole town of us from italy concentrated in this area of the triple cities in upstate new york cause of the shoe factories. So i had direct experience of the industrial era which followed the agrarian era, my grandfather, everyone in the town went to the factories and it dominated and any thought was the smokestacks of that. Before environmental law and the suit would be heavy on windowsills. You could smell the tanning pools and so on so that was a postindustrial era and my father fresh out of the paratroopers in World War Two was able to go to college on the g. I. Bill. I was born while he was in college, my parents married at 20 and had me at 21 he was like mopping the cafeteria for but the only member of his large family to go to college and he became a High School Teacher and a professor at Lemoyne College in syracuse so we moved into the new Service Sector economy so i had in my own Life Experience all these transitions in Human History so i think its given me kind of an insight into change. What im saying in the book is that those women, the country women were more powerful than any feminist area they were physically literally in. Before automatic washers and dryers, everyone did laundry by hand. I can remember my grandmother washing on the back porch with a washboard. They were powerful, like this and these women had big voices. And big attitudes. I mean, i took one when my father with father was taught Teaching High School in new york we lived for a year in the upper floor of a farmhouseand it was like a hilarious , my father was with his brother, they were sending out this smoking cigarettes and suddenly the farm woman , they yelled at them, they casted and escaped from a barn and she said stop her. To my father and my uncle. And the cat thundered by, my father and my uncle just stepped backwards and went by and they face the cast and came back carrying the cast and as shes passing she said men. Okay . Those were for thousands of years, country women had physical power and mental power, they were the rules of men. Its no coincidence that the first states and territories that gave women the right to vote or in the left, they were the pioneer areas where it was obvious that women really equals of men whereas the right to bury and the educated states, the states where the great universities were like pennsylvania and new york state, massachusetts and so on refused to grant women the right to vote, not until the constitutional amendment was passed in 1920. Its because the differential between the upper middleclass men and women in the late 19th century was very profound. Lady, a lady needed to be a different entity, needed to be far more emotional. They tended to be rather delicate so that was the idea of granting such women, however admirable the right to vote was not as easy as it was for the territory. Okay, why dont we just moved to the question. Because i love the question period and im sure you would do. I. Thank you, i didnt know the talk was happening until recently so im happy i stayed and you for coming. Oftentimes in discussions im having with people who i run the school with, friends of mine oftentimes over facebook where things quickly get lost in new nuance exists there. Oftentimes i feel like the best thing that i as aces gendered male can do is to die. And i realized that now hearing you talk and everything that this is kind of the results of the pendulum being swung very far to one end and i was wondering if you thought that we were are we now at the point where the pendulum is about to swing back into a more kind of moderate, lets all actually do something together and treat each other as equals, all genders, all races kind of thing . Im calling for men to take control again of their own lives. I said in a recent interview that if theres a Womens Center at Yale University which there is for the undergraduates, there should be a mens center. There should be absolute equality and the men should be totally free to do whatever they want in the Womens Center. They can show dirty movies or whatever they want. This constantly beating down as men, this demand that men redefine themselves until they suit what feminists want them to be is an outrage. And im saying throughout this book and the people that have written over the years that the civilization with all of its protections and conveniences, essentially the invention of men. I explained that in my first book, sexual personae by saying that womens power is so enormous that men had to band together to create these objective structures. I still think that my analysis of it is right but its men who are doing all of the hardest and dirtiest work in society. I tell the recent interview of, that a whole list of things. When theres an ice storm in the northeast, its the men who go out at 2 am with the live wires and so on. I see women going out. I never see women manning the great stacks of tar in the heat of the summer that people are mixing to put on the roof. I never see women as i did last year, i saw an enormous sewage break in a nearby town where many in hazmat suits who were up to their knees in the wastewater, not a single woman wanted to volunteer for that kind of work. People are still depending on men and keeping workingclass men in invisible. Ive lost an attack on Cheryl Sanders as an incredibly smugly entitled, talking about leaning in while at the same time concealing from site all of those servants she has and the nannies she has who are workingclass people who are supporting her particular very public lifestyle. I think in general men are erased , and also the contributions of workingclass people are erased and this has to stop. We need as much more enlightened feminism. I think that most men are in favor of women rising in society and being in charge, were no longer in the loop the old days so i want men to recover a sense of who they are as men again. And not feel they have to obey any lists or checklists being issued by gloria stein and company in manhattan. Okay. Hello. So a lot of what youve been saying is very very offensive and bothersome to me as aces gendered man. Living in the year 2017 in this city. And to your point about the ice storm in the northeast and how women are out there fighting that, why dont you think about these institutions that like road crews and the like microsessions and the sexism on these crews of the workingclass men . Im a landscaper and i can tell you that there is a huge degree of, okay, my question is about you believe that sexism is relevant because you said that women have to stop blaming men for their unhappiness and nowhere in there was a discussion of sexism in the workplace, that women are like treated as less smart, as less capable and it seems to me that your words are sort of reinforcing this notion, especially in terms of this workplace. I am an equity feminists. I believe in the removal of all advances to womens, all obstacles to womens advances in society in the professional and political realm. So absolutely, im very focused in the instance of workplace sexism. What im saying in my writing is that we are not simply looking individuals. There is a public side of our lives and theres a private side of our lives and sexual personae, a 700 page book i talked about the psychological , the dream life of mankind. There are all kinds of primitive impulses in us that are very atavistic. We want to understand ourselves as human beings or what, we cannot simply define human beings in terms of what we are in the workplace or in the political realm. And i believe that was actually the biggest legacy of the 1960s. The 1960s were about turning away from materialistic careerism and embarking on a kind of cosmic quest for meaning in the universe. And i think that my work offers a kind of dual perspective. Im talking about womens advances in society and what that upset and im also talking about our need as human beings to expand our imagination. I have even though im an atheist i have a ritualistic view of the universe and that is my particular vibration with native American Culture, that affects what im doing for the last nine years is trying to map the actual metaphysical religious perspective of the ancient native americans. I believe that my views of things as represented in sexual personae are very much involved with that. Thanks camille, thanks for coming. I havent read any of your books but ive seen your videos and im a fan. Anyway, i cant remember which video it was that you were talking about College Education and youre fed up with the whole style, i think you called it and make your own major. You think it should go back to sort of, i graduated from college couple, several months ago so ive never taken a survey course in my life and so i need to talk about what you think the benefit to that type of education would be. I think, as an absolute disaster what happened in the last 30 years. Im speaking of course as a Career College teacher which is this degeneration into the cafeteria where young people arrive in college and is a take this or this or this. And they have all these narrow courses being offered by professors who are teaching what they are interested in. That is not education at all, but thats the kind of education that the broadview, the abandonment of the great artistry survey courses has been a cultural disaster in this country. Used the you had two semesters. You would begin with the stone age and move all the way down by the end of the second semester to abstract expressionism and modernism. This gives a sense of the narrative history. But of course, with postmodernism and poststructuralism, there is an all narratives fall. There is a narrative in history, there is. And i talked about how the forms created by infotech the pyramid complex in egypt, that can be seen 5000 years later in our copoems and banks and all of our United States and europe. People who deal with artifacts of archaeology and history. They tend to recognize the legacy and the continuity and cultural traditions so i think that colleges need to be very strippeddown. They need to be making decisions about how to, what theyre going to be. I have been saying for 25 years that for me, the best multiculturalism would be to teach comparative religion, the great religions as a way to introduce students to the world, not just to the western tradition, to the entire world and if my plan had been followed, we wouldnt have a lot of the problems today in the incomprehension about islam, people would already know about the sacred text, or they be able to discuss what they didnt sit through. Following these particular verses of the koran. And you wouldnt even see this chaos that you have right now. Is. Of humanism is an absolute failure, absolute failure. Youngpeople , they are starved for meaning. Thats why there attacking politics. But you cant politics, this is a minor part of human existence. Theres something much bigger, much much bigger, the universe. Our whole realms of the meeting out there being on the political realm. Im not saying not to demand social reform, im not saying cease to be progressive and to look for the most just Human Society possible. What i am saying is that theres a mania abroad right now, a total of session with politics that again, this is a betrayal of the legacy of the 60s. A betrayal of the tremendous vision, the cosmic vision of the 1960s but i have written about this i believe the reason for that is that the apostles of that particular spiritual quest of the 60s are lost to us because they took too much lsd and never came back, thats the problem. And wrote the books which should have been the companion books my own work. Think you for your question. Thank you. Thank you for coming, i read sexual persona during, when i was recovering from a bout with sexism so workplace sexism is something that affects a lot of women. What can male allies do to help alleviate the common situation of workplace sexism . In a way that doesnt overly blame them . Im saying that a real man is honorable. A real man respects women. And that any man who abuses women or treats then in a denigrating fashion is showing weakness, a weakness that in fact comes from some inner sense that he has of womens overwhelming power and to prove that i had to write a 700 page book. All right, so im calling for a Mutual Respect between the sexes but im also calling for middleclass girls to stop asking for special protections. I want a quality of treatment in the workplace so i think theres too much decrying of mens behavior when in fact what too many white, uppermiddleclass girls are bringing now to the workplace is a certain manner of speaking , okay, that is removed from the actual harshness of the world. That workingclass women whether they come from the farmland or they come from the streets understand the risks and dangers of the world. From the most controversial writing that ive done is about the need for women to be amazon warriors for themselves. That is my philosophy, is streetsmart feminism or aminopterin amazon is. Thats why oppose with weapons and so many of my pictures. Its up to women themselves to understand the dangers of the world, not expect the world to be an extension of their protected, comfortable middleclass living room. Thats what i think is kind of what happened. I see women whose voices are strong enough. Women have to learn not to be embarrassed, to be loud. And to confront when it happens, and i see too many cases of women who are dismayed by something which may feel is demeaning and just to accept it. And that is not, no. The first time it happens you speak out. You speak out. You stop it. Youre in their face, immediately. And thats what i believe i represent. Which is that every moment that every day you have a responsibility to protect your own dignity. And it doesnt matter if youre embarrassed or you create anembarrassing situation, you protect yourself. When my generation arrived in college in 1964, the rules were in full power so that at harvard college, university of new york and binghamton, the girls had to sign in at 11 00 at night in the dorms and the guys could run free all night long. And so its my generation of women who said all right, we want the same treatment as men. We want the quality and freedom that men enjoy and the, colleges said no, the world is dangerous. We must protect you. We must protect you against ray and we said give us the freedom to risk rate. Freedom. Freedom is the value, not protection. So it dismayed me to see young women today warranting the parents back. Wanting the oversight, wanting to run committees when something goes wrong on a date area oppose that. I think its infantilized in and women have got to stop doing that. They have to govern their own relationships with men or with anyone else. And that is the only way women will ever become totally free and totally equal. Thank you. You just mentioned, you compared the agrarian. With the physical effort of that era that created strength in women and men and then going through the modern era, do you think that modern society would acknowledge is sustainable because constantly we are removing all of our structures and all of our efforts from the environment. I am concerned, yes and Versatile Technology today has become our artform, theres no doubt that the constant modulations and evolution of our handheld devices and so on are the equivalent of an art form and another society but i am very concerned about because of dependency on this new virtual reality. I love the land, i was from the founding issue of salon magazine, ive been part of it etc. But im very concerned because i see a pattern agent history which is when you have empires which become extremely affluent and extremely complicated with a, you get a very complex bureaucratic structures and everything gets so interwoven that its very easy for the whole thing to collapse. And at the same time you get an affluent educated class thats extremely tolerant, that has, thats rather hedonistic. That has no scruples about sexuality, homosexuality, anything goes. The ancient roman period, theyre vacationing on capri and in pompeii and so on. So im concerned that were heading towards a civilization that is so complex and so dependent on other people and in electric power, all it will take is one gigantic asteroid burst. That takes down the power grid andall of a sudden , that time is going to be scrabbling back to the primitives and barbaric realm again so i do feel some concern about the fragility of our culture and our removal from nature. And with secular humanism, theres also gone this constant vigilance i was talking about and the lack of this larger perspective. Yes, i think theres reason here, i feel shadows coming. In exit from disciple . My theory of history is cyclic. Everything, you know, i see a kind of organic pattern in history as an artistic style. Things begin and good ideas, high energy. It goes to a certain point and you start to get the decadence. I love decadence. Oscar wilde was after all my very first influence. I feel like i am in decadence at the sprawl of imperial rome. Just the androgyny, thats been my subject since i was in college. My participation, i consider myself transgender and i think people are starting to understand that my book sexual personae is, was a transgender book. It was a transgender protest against the power of nature. Finally i think people are starting to wake up to that. Okay. Its very nice to see another subject here in grand. Im sorry. I said its very nice to see another southern here native. Okay. Great. We have a common upbringing. Our fathers knew each other. And youre very big on extended families in the tribe, what sort of paradigm would you see for making this relevant in the 21st century . Im not sure that we can ever recover that tribal connectedness any longer but i do see it still surviving for workingclass families much more than for uppermiddleclass families. I notice this for example when going to the new jersey shore just to walk on the beach and so on. I see in those workingclass resorts like the wild woods how often you have multi generational families vacationing together. It makes me quite nostalgic. Thats something that is completely gone from the upper middle class. The more aptly you are, the lesslikely it is that youre going to go vacation with your parents. When people run off too expensive resorts in the caribbean, theyre not taking the grandparents with them but workingclass families in fairmont falls, in philadelphia, every week you can see immigrant families still, africanamerican families, for a day in the park with the food, the boys, football, etc. And they will take parkbenches and barbecue pits and spend the whole day there, multiple generations of a family altogether for the day at the park. Every time i see that it takes me all the way back to endicott and to what i remember thats lost now which is that everyone knowing each other. These people who came from the same town in italy and who would grow up next to each other. People didnt move but today we are in a transient culture. People get a job and will go hundreds of miles, thousands of miles are from their extended family. What you have today is a period of great difficulty for women trying to manage the household and also a job at the same time. Simultaneous is the collapse of the old extended family into the Nuclear Family. What im saying in my work is i think the Nuclear Family is toxic. This is something new and this is what conservatism, mike myers was conservative as i talk about the need for a two parent family and so on an ongoing throughout most of Human History there has never been a parent family, its been a multigenerational family has raised the children. Not this, so i believe that what we have today in america so often is these houses lined up next to each other with the two parent families and the children, theres this toxic cubicle for neurosis. I dont necessarily think thats ever been a healthy prescription for children and another thing is that at first, the women have benefited enormously from the invention of all these laborsaving applianceslike the automatic washer and dryer. And it saves women so much time, albeit laborious doing of the laundry and rinsing out those, squeezing the water out. But now today, the laundry which used to be communal activity with other women has turned into an isolated lonely thing for women. Youre trapped in the house doing laundry, etc. And also the higher you rise in affluence the less likely it is that you know the neighbors. You dont know the neighbors. Even if you know the neighbors, you would never dream of saying to them all, somethings, can you watch my 32 or three children while i run. You would never do that in 1 million years in an affluent neighborhood whereas workingclass neighborhoods, people know each other. They trust each other. And also people in workingclass neighborhoods particularly in cities like south philadelphia are oriented toward the streets. There watching, sitting on the stoop, sitting on the porch so theres a sense of a neighborhood thats like a Real Community of the old days. I think that as you move up the economic scale in terms of affluence and power in the workplace, theyre actually getting more and more neurotic the cause of the psychological dislocations that have not been i think fully confronted so i dont know exactly how to recover these things but i do think that its useful for women to realize how much theyve lost in terms of their solidarity with other women. Thank you for being here. I hope youll forgive me but im pretty obsessed with politics. And i am too, i follow it constantly. I would love to hear your thoughts on the forces that allowed the rise of mister trump, especially in the media. Well, im a democrat. I supported bernie sanders. I voted the second time for jill stein of the green party. I view the victory of trump as a response to the failures of the Democratic Party to confront real problems that are longstanding problems in the United States that the democrats had no solutions to. So i felt this coming for a very long time. I thought it was a terrible mistake to allow the dnc to push Hillary Clinton through the nominee. Im sorry, thats my opinion and i dont think, quite frankly i wish that there had been candidates in both parties. I think its about time for my generation to get off the stage for heaven sakes. I wanted nominees for both parties to the younger people in their 40s or early 50s and i dont know how it happened that we ended up with so many older nominees but i think that i hope this is going to be a great glass of energy into the politicalsystem soon. But its important for my party, for the democrats to do it seems to be a clear eye analysis of the reason for the loss because there were real issues, job creation and other things. Reduction of the federal bureaucracy, it was an issue. The democrats were helpless with that. I think bureaucracy is to me, and octopus, a parasite whether its in washington or its under the college campuses. Gilchrest, those are automatons, they are soulless. The minute you allow a entity to buy be run by bureaucrats, we are in trouble. The democrats just want to add on and on. This is not the way, i dont call it progressive. Aggressive is your deconstructing of the bureaucracy. Democrats have to come up with Better Solutions to the problems so they can start winning again. Okay. Sure. I would like to ask you to talk about the differences between men and women that you think are really important, whether they are hardwired or developed over thousands of years. In dealing, and thinking, in sex drive, in the workplace, Everyone Wants to say. I am at length in the sexual persona, i see about biological factors in the way that the mind works. For example, its partly satirical in chapter 1 of sexual persona but i think im right which is that boys have to learn because of their genital anatomy how to aim. If they dont learn how toaim , when they try to urinate, they will soil themselves and the wall and everything else. They must learn to aim. Okay . And eventually that carries over to the sex era so i talk about that focus and directedness and how freud talks about how primitive man trained himself on his ability to put out a fire with a stream of urine. And i say what a strange thing to be proud of but beyond the scope of any woman. Who would scorch her hands in the process of trying to put out a fire with a stream of urine. So i do believe, okay, there are sexual differences. I think that as civilizations evil as they become more complicated that gender eventually has a performance quality. It becomes an artifact like other artifacts, like works of art. Thats why i have a facebook on the subject but that ultimately there are very fundamental sexual differences that come from the fact that most men have 8 to 10 times the amount of testosterone in their bodies that women do. My entire life , men talk and think different, heterosexual men talk and think different from the way women think. I remember my father saying that he would listen to the women talking, my mother, my aunt and all and he said he could never follow the conversation. No names were being used. And sentences were being ended but yet everyone knew exactly what they were talking about and people would say hey, did he say, oh, you saw that . He saw that she saw . Okay and all right. And thats why i love the real housewives. I adore the real housewives, Gloria Steinem hates it but the real housewives absolutely record and document the women way women are in a group. Maybe not dissenting women, maybe not lesbian women, im talking heterosexual women in a group. I love to be around heterosexual women walking talking in a group and so do gay men. Its this weird energy that the women havewith each other and it goes all the way back to the hunter gatherer era. Vision of the universe. Intuitive quality. Biologically speaking every single self the human body, the dna has a dna code, tells you what actual gender of that body is. So that i think there is a lot of talk these days about the ability to change sex. But you can not change sex in point of fact. You can make modifications of body. You can take hormones further change appearance of the body. Ultimately at a certain point, every single cell in the human body will continue to show either male or female. Except for very tiny number of truly intersection people. I dont know what, you know you i exactly belong to. I do, never for a day in my life have i felt female. Never for a minute in my life felt female, but i dont feel like a man either. Im willing to acknowledge, you know, that i have a gender disfor yaw, and out of that gender disfor yaw, i. The truest thing ever said about sexual persona, about this gay intellectual guy in massachusetts, ran the gay and lesbian review back in the 90s. He said the voice ever sexual persona is voice of myra breckenridge. Myra enridge was a book by gore vidal. It should have been a great move by but a terrible movie made by a quell well. That is why i called my book, val orize the sexes. Transgender, people gain identity from the existence of the mass of men and mass of women. Okay . So i applaud you as a man. Okay. Thank you so much for being bold and going into the nonpc relmany. I grew up baptist taliban, made jump to libertarianism. From my perspective libertarian system about empowerment. It is party that women should be migrating to in my opinion. Yeah. In your opinion, how do we draw more women to the libertarian philosophy and explain to them it is power of empowerment . Whereas the democrat, progressive, idea to sort of replace men with the government . Whereas the libertarian philosophy, to empower women and while also empowering men . So how would we do that . I do call myself a libertarian as well even though im not really a part of the Libertarian Party at all, yes, i think this is really true. That which is exactly right. We can not have a situation where women now substitute the government, okay, for the male figures upon which we used to depend, for economic sustenance. I think we need many more actual parties in the United States. The problem we have this giant big tent parties, the two, which suck up all the oxygen and all the money, become a kind of porridge. There is no clear thing. Countries that have multiple parties, 12 or 13 parties, often are very fractured. They have to form coalitions in order to govern. So i can see the difficulty of multiple parties in a country of our size but absolutely no doubt need drastic reform of the present party structure. It will only come from the challenge, im trying to develop the green party too, even though i dont necessarily agree with the everything that the Green Party Stands for. So are you, would you say that you are in terms of your economic policy, as a libertarian, do you think you tend more toward, conservative or capitalist or, what i find myself to bees fiscally conservative. I think that Free Enterprise brought more people out of poverty than any government program. Ive traveled overseas quite a bit. Ive seen that. I think, that were facing a situation where we dont have Free Enterprise. We have burdensome regulation and taxation that is sort of suppressing Small Businesses and individuals to the advantage of too big to fail corporations. We bail out banks. We kick out homeowners. Yeah. So i would say yes, im fiscally conservative. I feel what we need in, especially innercity, in high school. Is the teaching of entrepreneurship to, you know, to disadvantaged youth, show them the way the system can work and, everything about the, kind of thing that comfortable middle class, upper middle class young people get from their parents who dont know banking, investment and so on. I definitely believe in much more jobs oriented educational system but at the high school and the college level. I think we are of same mind. Okay. Keep doing what youre doing. Be the change. Great, thank you, very good. No more questions . Okay. All right. Well, thank you very much for coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations]. Nicholas reynolds is next on booktvs visit to portland, oregon. He talks about the life and legacy of ernest hemingway. During our time in portland, oregon, we visited powell sit of books, to here historian, nicholas reynolds. His
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