«THERE SHOULD BE COURSE IN FIRST GRADE ON LOVE»

When I teach in Philadelphia at Art School, and then go up to Harvard, the difference is hilarious. On the streets of central Philadelphia, I see real men, African-American men, Italian-American men from South Philly, real masculine men, and thatUs a compliment. They have no doubt about their sexual identity. Most men of the world don't. The only men that are in doubt about their sexual identity are in the Ivy League schools, the professors and faculty as well. The women at Ivy League schools are constantly saying to the men, You're being like this, you're being like that, you shouldn't be like that. All the men are hectored; they are on women's leashes. It's hilarious that the virulent anti-male rhetoric is coming out of the Ivy League schools where there is not a virile masculine man in sight.Young women in the non-Ivy League schools have no doubt about their sexual identities either. The girls tend to dress more sexually. They are overtly female in the way they dress. They scorn the androgynous style that is popular in the Ivy League. They wear so much perfume that I had to speak to them about it. It would be considered vulgar for any undergraduate woman of an elite school to wear that much perfume, it means that you are trying to trap a man. The same with hair spray and cosmetics and so on. People in the Ivy League world then go off into media or into the law, moving in this weirdly special zone of demasculinized men who have planed down their personalities to fit in with powerful women. These are literate men, men who may jog, may go to health clubs, but theyUre not particularly physical men, not aggressive men.There is a kind of eunuchization of men on those campuses, and discourse is pouring out from the feminists classes about men and the effects about sexual identity and how the sexes don't really exist. The discourse is everywhere, even when people are not taking women's studies courses. Then they take it into the media with them. There is this creepy PC empty genteel rhetoric about sex that is so removed from reality, okay? It is no wonder. It is coming out of the most bizarre kind of eunuch's ghetto.»

In my work, I try to remain in touch with every day people, constantly testing my theories against what I see as a live ordinary people, on buses, in shopping malls, in the audiences of talk shows on T.V. I am constantly trying to test my theories against the norm. You have the post-structuralists influencing classes at Yale, saying there is no norm. There is a norm and most of the world lives according to that norm. Billions and billions of people in the world know what men are and what women are, and they are happy to be men and women. They are happy within traditional roles and a lot of my arguments with the feminist establishment and academic feminists come from the fact that I regard them as fiddling while Rome burns. These people are off in a little room talking at each other and not realizing that no one pays any attention to them, that they satisfy only each other, and their theories about sex are garbage.»

-Camille Paglia