Camille Paglia has a typically irritating review, of three recent academic books on masculinity, in a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Not irritating because I think she’s wrong, but because she’s gotten so lazy. If you want to be post-liberal, post-feminist, Harold Bloom-ian scourge-provocateur of the hidebound Academy, then you really have to bring it, but Paglia, much like her idol Bloom, just stopped bringing it at some point. She’s very very smart, and very very educated, but at some point in the last 15 years she just decided that she had her arguments and her tastes and she didn’t really need to bother with intellectual or literary growth anymore.
Thus you get a review like this, which says a bunch of probably correct but not very interesting things and says them in a workmanlike prose whose only real distinctiveness lies in its air of superiority and its not-quite-unforced enthusiasm for pop culture. And it ends, as I pretty much knew it would, with the now tiresome Paglia refrain:
All three of these books, in different ways, share the same dourly judgmental gender-studies doctrine, which surfaces at regular intervals. It asserts or implies that Western culture is inherently oppressive and based on male domination, which victimizes women, gays, and people of color. Gender differences are "constructed," not natural. Moral or legal codes "police" us as instruments of "social control." Our mental lives are hopelessly manipulated by invisible, impersonal power.
Despite their progressive political stance, Moore, Aydemir, and McLaren show dismayingly little interest in anthropology— the comparative analysis of world cultures over time. Generalizations about gender are otiose without wider study. Social and legal codes are as old as (and, indeed, indistinguishable from) civilization itself. Furthermore, bourgeois standards of polite decorum and tasteful humor, predicated on "appropriate" behavior in a middle-class office, cannot be projected backward wholesale to the agrarian or industrial eras. Even so expert a historian as McLaren is given to broad-brush parochialisms like, "Western culture had always stressed male and female differences." Well, good grief, what society, aside from Andy Warhol’s silver-walled salon, hasn’t?
Gender studies, for all its trafficking with porn and pop, too often paints a bleak, condescending picture of ordinary human life. Alternate views (even from among dissident feminists) are not considered or evidently even imagined. When any field becomes a closed circle, the result is groupthink and cant. The stultifying cliches of gender studies must end. But in the meantime, all faculty members should vow, through their own scholarly idealism rather than by external coercion, not to impose their political or sexual ideology on impressionable students, who deserve better.
The sad thing is that Paglia, I think, is right about some of the problems with academic writing about sex and gender. A lot of the work out there does paint a "bleak, condescending picture of ordinary human life," and does take refuge in a reductionistic politicizing of human complexity. But the response to that, at some point, has to move beyond criticizing the bad theory toward creating better theory.
Paglia’s done that, in books like Sexual Personae and Vamps and Tramps, but the latter was published in 1994, and her work for the popular press is consistently lazy and sloppy. And, just for the record (’cause I’m in a pissy mood), she’s totally wrong about this:
This book [Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid] has, hands down, one of the most arresting first sentences I’ve ever seen: "It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman’s relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge, love juice, man cream, and la leche." What mesmerizing vernacular poetry!
Nah. That’s not vernacular poetry, it’s a cheap, alt-weekly style sensationalistic opening sentence, and it doesn’t speak well for Paglia’s literary antennae that she likes it so much.
