Already the 4th largest source of that country's income as assorted kingpins vying for control of the trade horrific violence has erupted not only targeting rival gangs but also top government officials the military police businesses teachers bystanders and others more than 6000 Mexicans were gunned down in these wars last year with many of them having been tortured beheaded and otherwise brutalized What a gruesome mess you might say why don't the Mexicans clean up their drug problem start with this it's not their problem Americans not Mexicans are the ones snorting the tons of narcotics being trafficked by the gangs our demand drives the trade finance is the king pins and promotes the carnage yet rather than confronting our peoples addiction for what it is a health issue us authorities continue to pretend they can stop the supply spending billions each year on fatal police actions as for the hellish slaughter where do you think the gangs get the guns Mexico has strict gun laws prohibiting its citizens from buying the high powered assault weapons the cartels are using So 90 percent of their weaponry is coming from u.s. Gun dealers more than $6000.00 of which operate right along the border with a wink and a nod they brazenly sell tens of thousands of these guns to be smuggled across the border this is Joe they are saying Mexico supplies the drugs but our country supplies the customers the money and the guns their war is our. Hightower's commentaries are brought to you by the Hightower lowdown the monthly newsletter with high towers populist take on what the powers that be are up to find out more at Hightower lowdown dot org. I've watched her attackers and what Sheryl Sandberg has incredibly smugly entitled talking about and leaning in while at the same time concealing from sight all of those servants that she has in the nannies and she has you know working class people who are supporting her particular very public lifestyle we need it much more enlightened feminism I think than most men are in favor of women you rising in society and in charge and society we're no longer in and live in old days so I want to recover a sense of who they are as men again and not feel they have to have a checklist been issued by Doris Steinem and Company you know in Manhattan that's Camille Paglia and this is alternative radio I'm David Barr some young this edition of a our features Camille Paglia on free women free men the feminist movement in its various forms posed a genuine challenge to patriarchy male domination privilege among most men was seen as a right the way things were within the feminist movement there were different currents and tendencies it's accomplishments were myriad But there is still much work to be done massage any hostility sexual commodification harassment and violence against women persist there is still a gender wage gap women working full time in nearly every single occupation earn only 80 percent of what men do. Gender categories and sexual orientations and the stereotypes embedded in them have undergone a radical shift in recent years feminism and the women's movement are still seen as a threat by some particularly among more conservative religious minded people tearing down the old ways of thinking and behavior sometimes leads to confusion tension and cultural conflict it doesn't have to be that way our guest today is Camille Paglia she's University professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia She's a regular contributor to Solong dot com and the author of such books as vamps and tramps and free women free men she spoke at the Seattle Public central library and now Camille Paglia. My premier principles as a person and as a thinker are free thought and free speech I am truly a child of the 1960 s. And in that respect and I am totally opposed to any kind of curtailment of either of those 2 things for whatever laudable social causes in the Me anyone may think they have my particular wing of feminism was suppressed for many years my feminism predates 2nd wave feminism which was created by Betty Ford and with the with her co-founding of now in 1906 I was already a feminist because I was directly impacted by 1st wave feminism in the early 1960 s. When $961.00 when I was 14 years old I suddenly became obsessed with Amelia Earhart after an article about yet another clue was found whatever it was that was in the Syracuse Herald Journal and I embarked on a 3 year research project in high school in 2 Amelia Earhart I went to when to all kinds of places you know I ransacked you know the the the old newspapers in the bottles of the Syracuse library and so on and also I was I was obsessed with Katherine Hepburn whom I began to I saw on late night t.v. What it what I was getting from Katharine Hepburn I did not realize for decades was actually a real flame a 1st wave feminism because her mother was the head of the Connecticut woman suffrage organization Her heard her aunt was also a campaigner for law and suffrage and Hepburn herself campaign campaigned as a small child with balloons and you know a protest you know votes for women votes for women and cetera so I was getting that this 1st impact of 92930 s. After women had just won the right to vote in 1020 we wanted we wanted to reproduce in my new book The actual page from Newsweek magazine in 1963 letters to the editor where I had the I was given the lead. The editor when the Soviets launched Valentini Cova into space she was the 1st woman to enter space the time when women were banned from the American space program and I wrote a protest letter that was I was 16 years old this is before now Ok was it was ever found and I said that this this this happened she went to space on the very anniversary 35th anniversary whatever it was of a 1000000 Earhart flying the Atlantic and I said it's obvious that miss our hearts in a quest for equal opportunity for American women still remains to be won so I was already a feminist before all this happened in the late 1960 s when I tried to join the women's movement it did not succeed because the women's movement and I had all kinds of preconceptions about the suppression of speech. They were anti-rock n roll. You know go down the line or I was one of the later would call pro sex feminists so in the you know 970 s. For example you know I love Charlie's Angels Ok I loved Cosmopolitan magazine covers I mean while meanwhile the other feminist reelect occupying Helen Gurley Brown offices unlike in one to the whole magazine to be shut down etc I love the Bond girls James Bond girls are Ursula and dress coming out of the water with her white bikini. I love the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders there's no way I could be taken into the women's movement I was I was drummed out of it you know right from the start I was not made by Betty Friedan Betty for Dan did not create Germain Greer in Australia and she did not create me in upstate New York Ok and so about time people realized that transformations in women that happened very radically in the mid 20th century are not entirely due to the women's movement so now so what happened was Madonna and Madonna this was so important I mean the way Madonna is behaving now it's such an embarrassment because the current Madonna bears no resemblance to the the pioneering Madonna of the 1000. Is ninety's but she will live forever what she did her pro sex feminist movement of the night and ninety's was made possible by Madonna's trifling with pornography and exposure of the body and so on and her brilliant videos of the eighty's and ninety's I believe they are truly works of art and her her great period to us in 1903 and now you to see it anyway it's all of a sudden this long silenced wing of feminism the pro sex wing. Burst forth Ok in the 1990 s. There was feminists for free expression for example that I was allied with what we were fighting against was the horrible scourge of political correctness and suppression of free thought and free speech during the 1980 s. In the anti-porn movement led by Catherine MacKinnon and Dorchen Ok fanatics and those women you know the they take they wrote an ordinance which was indeed adopted by Minneapolis and Indianapolis to to shut down even the sale of men's magazines in those times unlike most Playboy and Penthouse and so on on the grounds that supposedly pornography caused violence against women cause rape cause murder etc etc These women are we do ranged in to truly deranged women but they ruled the 1980 s. And feminism so then thanks to Madonna my Prosek swing you know femmes arose out the Ok and also was helped along by the lipstick lesbians of San Francisco it was a sell of them came sort of black leather you know lesbians and so on and so then we went national and you know and I thought Oh now we've won this no problem but now I have to go back on the road Ok to 23 years later I have to return all of a sudden with gone full circle again that this this horrible scourge you know of political correctness is back even worse Ok we have people rioting and smashing windows at Berkeley Ok the place you know that the capital of the Free Speech Movement and so on Ok so here I am again Ok. I'm not happy about it now I'm calling for an end to the sex war in feminism women are well launched now with this kind of this this this reflects snide you know put downs of men that are there everywhere this is got to stop my and I notice you know wherever I go in the world actually that's upper middle class career women are very unhappy very unhappy even though they might they have achieved a certain status. What I'm saying is not that kind of feminism to stop blaming men for their own unhappiness that the unhappinesses do I believe too huge to steam the changes that it women for dinner for thousands of years women had their own worlds there was the world of women and there was the world of men and the end if the sexes didn't have that much to do with each other this is a brand new experiment to have this new system we're now women can be economically independent now they're no longer dependent on father or husband or brother for their sustenance and but in their working side by side with men in the workplace and this is an experiment it's never happened before we may have to accept a certain amount of tension between the sexes in the workplace and that if the feminist idea that we can just suppressed men enough women will be happy I say no I say it at it's on the basis of my own experience as a child and Italian American immigrant community is that what women have lost is the old solidarity that they once had when they totally rule the private sphere women's life all day long was with other women one's multi-generational older women Ok as well as the children it was a huge tribal experience and now what women arcs are feeling is a sense of isolation and loneliness disconnection from from their old function I'm not saying to go back as far as saying I'm just saying stop blaming men that for example these marches that just happened to have people in the women were exhilarated they were they were Mrs there are called I don't think it had anything to do with feminism or anti Trumper and then like I thought it was that women suddenly felt that surge of happiness again for being with other women I'm like you can actually see it in the in the Odyssey when a deceit is is is washed. Naked and alone is what's this ship you know on the on the shores of and he and he wakes to the sound of girls women's voices laughing and singing and so on it's the prince's Nozick going down to do the laundry on the shore and actually that is exactly what was going on up until fairly recently where women were all together they did all the chores together they did they did the laundry they did the cooking and I can remember this from my childhood in Endicott New York upstate New York the among the immigrant Italian women all 4 of my Grandparents Plus my mother were born in Italy that's I actually had that experience the experience that went on for thousands of years in the agrarian era where women all together in fact 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 ill Sora go which was a fountain and cut out of the side of the mountain probably went back thousands of years to the Church of the Roman period so I'm she remembered the singing. You know the picnicking cetera et cetera Ok so there was a there even though people were laboring physically in the agrarian era there was a happiness a sense of identity there was no quest for identity now it's no place for independent thinker Ok if you were an independent thinker you had no options as a woman said to become a nun Ok so I know Ok I know a little bit a nun Ok 100 years ago and obviously you know communities are intellectually repressive in their own way nevertheless we're in a period now of quest for identity tremendous pressures on young people to form their own identity separate from those old automatic tribal and community affiliations so I think there's a tremendous I mean as a classroom teacher you know of now you know more than 40 years I can see this and it's really you know I think this is a tremendous sense of psychological look this will cation among among young people and in the end they find many. Ways to try to achieve some sort of a bit of an entity and part of it right now of course is social media which is causing the total you know there are entropy in terms of ability to read to reason to read to write you know the old things. So much now I'm now I'm also calling for an end to this this insanity of excluding biology Ok from gender studies how in the world did this happen how did women's studies in genders that is end up teaching about gender without any reference whatever to biology or to hormones and right now post-structuralism dominates a gender studies everywhere now didn't I mean I spent 6 months writing my deception of fuko Ok what is a 27 years ago I mean at assignment Hello anyone who thinks that is somehow you know that the master of the universe has clearly not read my exposure of him in junk bonds and corporate raiders I mean the man was a fraud I'm sorry the post-structuralist pose as leftists but what were they doing in the past few decades with this with this crazy heresy the growth of this administrator a master class of men that has had that's taken over the universities right at a period of obscene rise in tuition costs student debt that's crippling families and so on where were these Leftist the great leftists and our college campuses were they resisting the at the administrators to pay where they did now thing student debts where they lament thing you know the plight of teachers and so on and now they're all running to conferences talking about fuko with us to believe this jargon Ok and that maybe you think they thought that's what that's left is them these posts structureless are the worst mercenary careerists in this country the leading post-structuralist of and new. Straw sis are retiring as multi-millionaires you mean it in a post as leftists say it is a sin Yeah and I didn't forget to call for heaven sakes I mean absolute absurd and so we have to bring biology and authentic study of you know of medicine of anthropology of history you know back into gender studies as well one thing I'm definitely going for now and aside from these things I'm on the warpath against the bureaucracy of the campuses and it when I would have been in college my 1st job in the 1970 s. a We actually met in 76 there was we had an uprising Ok as a as a as faculty against the trustees and the administrators the in the president of a college and it was like huge publicize Nora Ephron went up there wrote it up for you know for a square magazine and so on and in the faculties are are totally castrated What are they doing to the faculties of actually been marginalized you know in this country and they've been under a peep as this administrator masterclass took over the ministry those who are in league with federal. Mandates of federal authorities and in Washington and again the leftists you know talk the talk talk the big talk a the do nothing really matters Ok which is demand you know 50 percent reduction in the number of administrators survey and also you know 75 percent reduction their salaries which often exceeds that of the faculty members people should realize how many of the ills that I'm decrying about the suppression of speech and free thought on campus are coming from the mistress and you know who are these social welfare or do gooders Oscar Wilde was absolutely scathing about these humanitarians the these aggressive philanthropists who dominated the Victorian period. Reprint of what I consider an important piece of mine in Time magazine where I called for the end of this outrageous in age 21 law in the United States where young people cannot. A beer is no where in the world except in very repressive regimes you know like the United Arab Emirates and so on this or anything like that with Mothers Against Drunk Driving what they wandered into an area here has been extremely destructive when that rule was passed 19 Eighty-Four what did young people do with it unable now to drink they began taking the club drugs course of an ecstasy and ketamine all this crap that they take into their bodies and what's 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 be able to sit in with with the opposite sex learn how to talk how to flirt discuss ideas it has absolutely a cruel law no one has raised me you can buy marijuana in Colorado and young people can't get a glass of beer Ok when they arrive in college you realize how outrageous that is that has to end just just to return to what I was saying about you know the solidarity of women in the agrarian period I think probably part of my ability to analyze things come comes from my exposure to that kind of a capsule condensed version of the of of human history I've experienced the aggressor in Iraq through my contact with those those most powerful country women who had immigrated to the power of the rural paradigm and the strength of Southern women and so on but we were whole town of us really from Italy concentrated in this area of the triple cities in New York because of the shoe factories in the country and shoe factories so I then had a direct experience of the industrial era which followed the agrarian era when my grandfather ever had a run on the town went to the factories which dominated and because their smokestacks in that period before environmental laws. The suit would be heavy you know on the. Windowsills you can smell the tanning pools and so on so I the. Era and then my father fresh out of the of the paratroopers in World War 2 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 so he was like mopping the cafeteria floor the only member of his large family to go to college then he became a high school teacher and then a professor. In college and in Syracuse so he we moved into the new service sector economy so I in my own life those women the country women were more powerful than any feminist and they were physically powerful literally in that period before automatic washers and dryers everyone did laundry by hands and I can remember my grandmother washing on the back porch with a washboard they were powerful like this and I and these women had big voices big attitude signs I mean I think once when my father was teaching high school in the small farming town of Oxford New York we lived for a year in the upper floor of a farmhouse and there was like a hilarious moment with my father was out with his brother they were sitting outside smoking a cigarette and suddenly the you know the farm woman. Yelled at them to get a calf had its escaped from the barn and they said and and she said stop her to my father and my uncle and and the calf funded by my father and my uncle just step backwards as I went by and the farm one went chased the calf and came back carrying the calf and as she's passed the she said nay and. Ok those were the women for thousands of years of their country women had physical power and mental power and they were the equals of men in fact it's no coincidence that the 1st states and territories to give women the right to vote were the word in the West Ok that he was the pioneer areas where it was obvious that women were the equals of men whereas it right to the very end the the educated states of the states where the great universities were like like in Pennsylvania New York state Massachusetts and so on refused to grant women the right to vote not until the constitutional amendment was passed in 1920 it's because the differential between and between the between the upper middle class man album middle class woman Ok in the late 19th century early 20th century was very profound to the lady a lady seemed to be a different entities and to be far more emotional tinge of faint you know tend to be rather delicate matter I said that the idea of granting such women however admirable and the right to vote was not as easy as it was for the for the territories or what why don't we just move to the question period then because I love the question period I'm sure you would too I realize that now you talking everything that this is kind of the result 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 worth pendulums about to swing back into a more kind of moderate let's all actually do something together and treat each other as equals all genders all races and think Well I'm calling for men. Control again of their own lives I think I've said in a recent interview that if there is a women's center Yale University which there is for the undergraduates and there should be a men's center they should be absolute equality and the men should be totally free to do whatever they want in them and center where they can show dirty movies or whatever whatever they want Ok I this is this country beating down of men this demand that men redefine themselves until they suit what's feminists want them to be it's an outrage that civilization it with all of its protections and conveniences is essentially the invention of men now explain I explain that in my 1st book Sexual persone by saying that woman's power is so enormous that men had to band together to go off and in to create these objective structures and I still think that my analysis of it is absolutely right but it's men who are doing all of the you know the hardest and dirtiest work in society there's a minute whole list of things when there's an ice storm you know in the Northeast it's the men who go out at 2 am to like to do with the fall the live wires and so on I rarely see women going out at that hour I never see women manning the grates vats of tar in the heat of the summer that or people are mixing to put on the roof Ok I never see women when as I did you know last year saw an enormous sewage break in a neighboring town with where men in hazmat suits were up to their knees in waste water not a single woman wants to volunteer for that kind of work people are still depending on men and keeping working class men invisible I've I've launched an attack for example on Sheryl Sandberg. As incredibly smugly entitled talking about you know leaning in while at the same time. Sealing from sight all of those servants that she has and the nannies that she has who are who are you know working class people who are supporting her particular very public lifestyle there's a I think in general you know it's men are a race the country is the men are a race and also the contributions of working class people are erased and this has to stop Ok it has to stop we need it much more like in feminism I think that most most men are in favor of women. Being in society and being in charge in society we're no longer in that and to live in old days so I want men Ok to to recover a sense of who they are as men again and not feel they have to obey in the list a checklist being issued by Doris Steinem and Company in you know in Manhattan Ok. Do you believe that sexism is relevant because you said that women have to stop blaming men for their own happiness and no where 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 what we're place well I am an equity feminist that is I believe in the removal of all it Vance's to women's. Obstacles to women's advance in society in the professional and political realm so absolutely I'm very focused on and the instance of workplace sexism what I'm saying and my writing is that we are not simply what working individuals with there's a there is a public side of our life and there is a private side of our life in Sexual Personae I talked about the psychological Dreamlife of mankind there are all kinds of primitive impulses in us that are very at a vesting we want to understand ourselves as human beings or what Ok we cannot simply define human beings in terms of of what we are in the workplace or in the political realm I believe that was actually the biggest legacy of the 1960 s. And sixty's were about turning away from to realistic career ism and barking on a kind of cosmic quest for meaning in the universe so I think that my work offers a kind of dual perspective I'm talking about. Women's advance in society and what that's helps that and I'm also talking about our need as human beings too to expand our imaginations I have a even though I'm an atheist I have a very spiritual istic view of the universe. And that is my particular vibration with Native American culture that's in fact what I'm doing for the last 9 years is trying to trying to map Ok the actual metaphysical religious perspective of the ancient Native Americans I believe I'm that my views of things as represented in Sexual Personae are very much. Invited with that. I care which video it was but you were talking about college education and you're fed up with the whole cafeteria saw thing you called it The invent your own major you can actually go back to a survey sort of and I graduated from college a couple several months ago so I've never taken a sort of a course in my life so I was hoping you could talk about what you think the benefits of that type of education Yes I think it's a bit and the absolute disaster what's happened in the last 30 years I speaking as a course as a career college teacher which is this is this degeneration into the cafeteria man year where young people arrive in college and say you can teach take this or this or this or this or this or this and then you have all these like kind of narrow courses being offered by professors who are basically teaching what they're interested in and I think that is not education and all that that that the best kind of education gives the broad view that you know the abandonment of the great art history survey course has been a cultural disaster in this country where it used to be you had 2 semesters you would begin with with cave art the stone age and move all the way down by the end of the 2nd semester to abstract expressionism and modernise and this gives a sense of the narrative of history but of course within postmodernism and post-structuralism there are an all narratives are false Ok everything the police there is a narrative in history there is and then you know I've talked about how you know the pillar forms created by imho tap at the at the pyramid complex at soccer and Egypt that can be seen 5000 years later Ok in in our Kryten columns and banks all over the United States and Europe and so on people who deal with artifacts of archaeology and in history can recognize the legacy and in the continuity and cultural traditions so I yes I think that colleges need to be very stripped down. They need they need to made be making decisions about how to about what they're going to teach and I have been saying for 25 years that for me the best multiculturalism would be to teach comparative religion the rate the world religions as as a waiter introduce students to the world not just of the Western tradition to the entire world and if my plan had been followed we wouldn't have a lot of the problems today in comprehension about about Islam people would already know about the sacred texts it would be able to discuss this group is following these particular verses of the Koran this this group is going on and it wouldn't be this chaos if you have right now in this period of secular humanism is an absolute failure absolute failure that young people are starved for meaning that's why they're clinging to politics but you cannot cling to politics politics in the social ground this is minor it's a minor part of human existence or the something much bigger much much bigger the universe there are there whole wells of deep meaning out there be on the political realm I'm not saying not to demand social reform I'm not saying yes to cease to be progressive and and and to look for the most just human society possible but I am saying that there is a kind of mania abroad right now. A total obsession Ok with with politics that is this is not a good this is a b. Trail of the legacy of the sixty's of the trail of the tremendous vision the cosmic vision of the 1960 s. And I've written about this I believe that the reason for that is that the you know the apostles of that particular spiritual quest of the sixty's are lost to us because they took so much l.s.d. They never came back that's the problem they never wrote the books which you know which should be in the companion books to my own work thank you for your question. You're listening to Camille Paglia free women free men this is independent alternative radio you can order copies of this program by calling 1800 triple 41977 that's 180-444-1977 or you can order online on our website alternative radio dot org That's alternative radio dot au r g what can nail allies do to help. Alleviate the common situation of workplace sexism Well I'm saying that a real man is honorable. A real man respects women. And that's it any man who abuses women or treats them in a denigrating fashion is showing weakness a weakness that in fact comes from some inner sense that he has of woman's overwhelming power so I'm so I'm calling for a neutral recognize that Michel respects between the sexes but I'm also calling for middle class girls to stop asking for special protections again I want equality of treatment in the workplace and I think there's too much you crying of men's behavior when in fact what too many white upper middle class girls are bringing now to the workplace is a certain manner of speaking that is removed from the actual harshness of the world that actually working class women whether that it whether they come from the farm land or they come from the street and understand the risks and dangers of the world but the most controversial writing that I've done is about the need Ok for women to be Amazon Amazon warriors for themselves and that is my philosophy is street smart feminism or Amazon is and that's why I posed with weapons and so many of my pictures. It's up to women themselves to understand the dangers of the world not expects the world to be an extension of their protected comfortable middle class living room and that's I think what's kind of what's happened I see I see women who whose voices aren't strong enough women have to learn not to be embarrassed to be loud and confronts when it happens and I see too many cases of women who are dismayed by something which they feel is demeaning and who just who do who just accept it and that is not know now the 1st time it happens you speak out you speak out you stop it you're in their face. Immediately you see Ok and that's what I believe I represent which is that every moment of every day you have a responsibility to protect your own dignity and it doesn't it doesn't matter if you're embarrassed or you create an embarrassing situation you protect yourself now you see when I went when Mike my generation arrived in college and 64 the parietal rules were in full you know in full power so that at Harper college the University of New York at the time to when I went to college the girls had to sign in at 11 o'clock at night into the dorms and then the guys could run free all night long and so it's my generation of women who said Ok We want this same treatment as men we want the equality that freedom that men enjoy and the you know the colleges said no the world is dangerous we must protect you we must protect you against rape and we said give us the freedom freedom is the value not protection Ok so I it dismays me to see young women today wanting the parent figures back wanting the oversight wanting to run to committees when something goes wrong on a date I oppose that Ok I think it's infantilizing and I 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 you compare the agrarian period with. The physical effort of that era that created strength in women and men and then going into the modern era where people became more fragile do you think that modern society would acknowledge is sustainable. Technology today is become our art form there's no doubt that you know that the constant modulations and evolution of our hand-held devices and so on it's the equivalent of art forms in another and another society but I am very concerned about our excessive dependency on this new virtual reality now I love the Web You know I was you know from the founding issue of Salon magazine I've been part of it etc But I'm very concerned because I see a pattern from Engine history which is that when you have empires which become extremely affluent and extremely complicated with a. You get very. Complex bureaucratic structures and everything gets so interwoven that it's very easy for the whole thing to collapse here and at the same time you get you get a affluent educated class that's extremely tolerant Ok that's that that has you know that is rather hedonistic that has no a scruples about the heterosexuality homosexuality and so on anything goes out of there you know there in the ancient Roman period there vacationing on kept pre and home pay and so on so I am concerned that we're heading toward a civilization that is so complex and so dependent on other people and it particularly Lector power all it will take is one gigantic asteroid verse that takes down the power grid and all of a sudden mankind is going to be scrabbling back to the primitive 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 has also gone this this cosmic vision I was talking about in the last the lack of this larger perspective but yes I mean I don't. I think there's a reason you know I feel the shadow I feel shadows coming at us Ok so you know. Well I think my theory of history is cyclical I see a kind of organic pattern in history as an artistic styles things begin and you know great ideas high energy it grows to a certain point and then you start to get the decadence Now I love decadence and I . Was after all my you know my very 1st influence so I feel like I'm a decadent it you know and. Hear all wrong. So I'm very interested. And drudging me that's been my my my subject you know since I was in college. My dissertation 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 trip transgender protest against the power of nature finally I think people are starting to wake up to that we have come up with. A fathers knew each other. And you're very good on extended family clinch Well what sort of power going would you see for making this relevant in the 21st century Well I'm not sure that we can ever recover that tribal connectedness any longer ite but I do see it still surviving for a working class families much more than for upper middle class families I noticed this for example when going to the New Jersey shore just to walk on the beach and so on I see in those working class resorts of like the wild ones and how how often you have multi generation of family's vacation together it makes me quite nostalgic that it's something that's completely gone from the upper middle class the more affluent you are the less likely it is that you're going to go cation with your parents Ok when people run off to expensive resorts in the Caribbean and so on they're not taking you know the grandparents with them but working class families Fairmount Park in Philadelphia you know every week you can see immigrant families still African-American families they'll come for a day in the park with the food. Toys football and cetera and it will take us and park benches the barbecue pits and so I spend the whole day there multiple generations of a family all together for the day at the park and every time I see that it takes me all the way back to and because and to what you know what I remember that's lost now which is that everyone knowing each other the people who came from the same town in Italy and the people grew up next to each other you know people didn't move today we're in a very transient culture or people to get a job will go a 100 hundreds of miles thousands of miles far from the extended family which you have today it's a great it's great difficulty for women trying to manage a household and also a job at the same time the simultaneous is the collapse of the old extended family into the nuclear family now what I'm saying in my work is that I think the nuclear family is toxic this is something new and this is what conservatives you know might market with conservatives because they talk about you know that the need for a 2 parent family and so on I'm going if you look throughout most of human history there has never been a 2 parent family it's been multigenerational family has raised you know the children right not just so I believe that what we have today in America so often is like these houses lined up next to each other with you know 2 parent family in the children of these actually a kind of toxic cubicles for neurosis Ok hunt necessarily think that it's ever been you know a healthy prescription for children to be race and another thing is that a 1st the you know women have benefited enormously from the invention of all these labor saving appliances like the automatic new washer and dryer and so on this is it saves women so much time compared to all the laborious doing of the laundry and and you know rinsing out the squeezing the water out and so on they had these but now today. The laundry which used to be a communal activity with other women has turned into an isolated lonely thing you know for women you're trapped in the house to the laundry and also you the higher up you rise in affluence the less likely it is that you know the neighbors you don't know the neighbors and even if you know the neighbors you you would never dream of saying to them oh some ways come up can you just watch you know my 2 or 3 children Ok Will I just run to you would you would never do that a 1000000 years ago in an affluent neighborhood where as in a working class neighborhood people know each other they they trust each other at also people in working class neighborhoods particularly in cities like South Philadelphia. Oriented toward the streets they're watching this they're sitting on the stoop The sitting on the porch Ok so there's this sense of of a neighborhood it's a really it's like a real community of the old days but again I think that as people move up the economic scale in terms of affluence and power in the workplace they're actually getting more and more neurotic because of the of the psychological dislocations that have not been I think you know fully confronted so I don't know exactly how to recover these things but I do think that it's useful for women to realize how much they've lost in terms of their solidarity with other women I would love to hear your thoughts on on the forces that allow the rise of Mr Trump especially in the media. Well I mean you know I supported Bernie Sanders I voted. For the 2nd time for Joel Stein of the Green Party and so on I view the victory of Trump as a response to the failures of the Democratic Party to confront real problems there are long standing problems in the United States that the Democrats have no solutions to I felt this coming in for a very long time I thought it was a terrible mistake to allow the d.n.c. To push Hillary Clinton through as the not the nominee I'm sorry it's my opinion quite frankly I wish that there had been younger candidates in both parties I think it's about time for my generation the baby boomers to get off the stage 5 and 6 you know what I wanted I wanted nominees for both parties to be younger people in their forty's early fifty's I hope this is going to be a great blast of energy into the political system soon it's important for the Democrats to do seems to me a very clear eyed analysis of the reasons for the loss because they were there were real issues in the job creation and other things reduction of the federal bureaucracy it was an issue the Democrats were helpless with bureaucracy is to me you know an octopus a parasite whether it whether it's in Washington or it's on the college campuses bureaucrats you know are automatons they are absolutely solace in them the minute you allow any you know any entity to be run by bureaucrats Ok where we are in trouble right now and this for the Democrats just want to add on and on and on this is not the way I don't call that progressive Ok progressive is to deconstruct the bureaucracies so again Democrats have to come up with better solutions to problems and they'll start winning again I would just like to ask you to talk some about the differences between men and women that you think are really important whether they're hardwired to or have developed over thousands of years in. Fueling in thinking in sex drive in place if you want to yes I I speak about biological factors in the way the mind works I for example I mean it's slightly satirical in chapter one of Sexual Personae But you know I think I'm right which is that boys have to learn because of their genital anatomy how to aim if they don't learn how to aim when they try to urinate Ok they will soil themselves on the wall and everything else they must learn to aim and eventually that carries over into the sex act and so I'm I talk about that focus and direct ness and how you know Freud talks about how primitive man Korean himself and his ability to put out a fire Ok with a stream of urine and I say I say it was a strange thing to be proud of but beyond the scope of any woman who would scorcher hands in the process of trying to put out a fire with a stream of urine so I do believe that there are sexual differences I think that that as civilizations you've evolved as as they become more complicated that gender eventually has a performance quality that that it becomes an artifact like other artifacts like works of art 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 than than women do my entire life I've noticed the way men talk and think is different McKenna or sexual men talk and think different than the way women think I remember my father saying he could that wouldn't when he would listen to the women talking my mother and my aunt and you know all that he said he could never follow the conversation then no names are being used and sentences were being ended but yet everyone knew exactly what they were talking about and I noticed that my. People say did he see that he he saw that. He saw that she saw. Our son and that's why I love The Real Housewives and what is my my I adore the Real Housewives Gloria Steinem hates it Ok you say by the Real Housewives absolutely Ok records and documents the way women are in a group a now maybe not dissenting women maybe not lesbian women and I'm just I'm a heterosexual women Ok all right in a group I love to be around heterosexual women talking in a group Ok and so do a lot of gay men that's why they're stylists and so on and so forth and this is her weird energy and that the women have with each other and it goes all the way back to the hunter gatherer era Ok where the women were all talking with each other around the hacked while the men went off in the hunting party and had to be quiet and silent while they struck the pray and you see the talkative men didn't last long. But at the same time it's an issue I do feel that. The transgender people and that you know many gay men occupy a kind of middle ground between the sexes and a lot and tremendous amount of the history of the arts it was created in that middle ground that the. Transgender shamans. You know vision of the universe had and to it of quality you know but it biologically speaking every single cell of the human body d.n.a. Has a d.n.a. Code in it which tells you what the actual gender of that body is so that I think there's a lot of talk these days about the ability to change sex but you cannot change sex in point of fact you can make modifications of the body you can take hormones that that further change the appearance of the body but ultimately a certain point every every single cell in the human body will continue to show that it is either male or female except for a very tiny number of truly intersex people you know I don't know what's you know I guess actually belong to I never for you know a day in my life have I felt female never for a minute in my life I felt you know but I don't feel like a man either Ok so I'm willing to acknowledge you know that I have a gender dysphoria Ok and out of that gender dysphoria I made a lot of books Ok my voice is the voice of a transsexual this is this is absolutely true but nevertheless I believe that's why I've called my book free women free men that it's time to valorize the sexes transgender people in the middle actually gain identity from the existence of the mass of men and the mass of women so I applaud you as a man Ok. Thank you so much for being bold and going into non p.c. Room Ok and powers people like me I sort of grew up the Baptist Taliban if you will and I made the jump to libertarianism and from my perspective Libertarianism is a is about empowerment it is the party that women should be migrating to in my opinion in your opinion how do we draw more women to the libertarian philosophy and explain to them that it is the party of the power men whereas the Democrat progressive The idea is sort of to replace men with the government whereas the libertarian philosophy is to empower women and while also empowering middle so why would we be yes I do call myself a libertarian as well even though I'm not really part of the Libertarian Party you know and all but say yes I think this is really true that which which is exactly right we cannot have a situation where women now substitute the government. For the male figures upon which we used to depend a for economic system that's I think we need many more actually parties in the United States the problem is we have these like giant big tent parties in the 2 which suck up all the oxygen and all the money and become a kind of porridge there's no clear but you know countries that have multiple parties often are very fractured you have to have to form coalitions in order to govern so I can see the difficulty of multiple parties in a in a country of our size but there's absolutely no doubt that we need to address his drastic reform of the present party structure and I think it will only come from the Challenger and that's why I'm trying I'm trying to develop on the Green Party to even though I don't necessarily agree with everything the Green Party stands for I mean yes I so are you would you say that you are in terms of your economic policy as a as a Libertarian do you think you tend more to toward the word conservative or can. The list or what I find myself to be fiscally conservative I think that free enterprise has brought more people out of poverty than any government program and I've traveled overseas quite a bit and I've seen that I think that we're facing a situation where we don't have free enterprise we have some regulation and taxation that sort of suppressing small businesses and individuals to the advantage of too big to fail corporations we bail out the banks we kick out the home you know the homeowner so so I would say yes I'm fiscally conservative I feel that what we need in social in the inner city in high school is teaching of entrepreneurship to you know to disadvantaged youth to show them the way this system can work the kind of thing that comfortable middle class upper middle class young people get from their parents you know banking and stock and investment and so I mean I can definitely believe in a much more jobs and educational system at the high school and the college level and I think we are at the same Ok thank you so much of the u.k. When what you're doing Be the Change thank you right Ok All right very good thank you very much for coming thank. You women Freeman she spoke at the Seattle Public Central Library Camille Paglia is the University professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the owner in Philadelphia She's the author of many books including free women free men . This program is produced by alternative radio based in Boulder Colorado we are independent and part of the nonprofit media education organization rise up we are supported solely by individuals just like you we feature progressive voices rarely heard in the media such as Vandana Shiva modally over she'd Rebecca soln that Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz Angela Davis David Korten Richard Wolfe and Niamey Klein to access our complete audio and book catalog just go to our website alternative radio dot org Again our website where we are part casting alternative radio dot au r.g.b. To place a credit card order for C.D.'s m p 3 zone written transcripts of today's program Camille Paglia free women free men call us at 1800 triple 41977 again that number is 180-444-1977 or you can order on our website alternative radio dot org Ed Mays recorded the program Joe Ritchie is our general manager and editor I'm David Barsamian thank you for listening. And it is just about 7 o'clock. This is getting hate having to help me access radio moments brings Carbondale the wrong Fork Valley and beyond support. Arcadian Kay comes from Once Upon a child buying and selling children's clothing located at 3110 Blake Avenue and Glenwood Springs more information at 5574181 and that once upon a child limits brings dot com. In for a 3 hour tour and to pay tribute to night to Gregg Allman and all my brothers was my 1st concert at Red Rocks you know start off the kids' show with Elizabeth Mitchell singing Blue sky. Where on.