the female and she turns away, and turns
away, and he looks a fool but he keeps on
pursuing her. And maybe she’s testing his
persistence; the strength of his genes... It’s
a pattern in the animal kingdom — a court-
ship pattern...’ But for pointing such things
out, Paglia adds, she has been ‘defamed,
attacked and viciously maligned’ — so, no,
she is not in the least surprised that wolf-
whistling has now been designated a hate
crime in Birmingham.
G
irls would be far better advised to
revert to the brave feminist approach
of her generation — when women were
encouraged to fight all their battles by them-
selves, and win. ‘Germaine Greer was once
in this famous debate with Norman Mail-
er at Town Hall. Mailer was formidable,
enormously famous — powerful. And she
just laid into him: “I was expecting a hard,
nuggety sort of man and he was positively
blousy...” Now that shows a power of speech
that cuts men up. And this is the way women
should be dealing with men — finding their
weaknesses and susceptibilities... not bring-
ing in an army of pseudo, proxy parents to
put them down for you so you can preserve
your perfect girliness.’
In an hour’s non-stop talking, Professor
Paglia is only lost when asked which young-
er feminists she would pass the baton to. ‘I
would love to inspire dissident young femi-
nists to realise that this brand of feminism
is not all feminism...’ she says, before citing
Germaine Greer as the woman she admires
most alive, and Amelia Earhart and Kathar-
ine Hepburn as heroines alas dead.
As with Greer, it is Paglia’s power of
speech that utterly devastates. Her collected
works read like a dictionary of vicious quo-
tations. (Leaving sex to the feminists? ‘Like
letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist.’
Lena Dunham? ‘She’s a big pile of pudding.’)
Paglia is pro-liberty, pro- pornography, pro-
prostitutes and anti- any and all special treat-
ment when it comes to women in power: ‘I
do not believe in quotas of any kind. Scan-
dinavian countries are going in that direc-
tion and it’s an insult to women — the ideathat you need a quota.’ Which brings us back
to Hillary and the so-called victory her re-
entering the White House would represent:
‘If Hillary wins, nothing will change. She
knows the bureaucracy, all the offices of gov-
ernment and that’s what she likes to do, sit
behind the scenes and manipulate the levers
of power.’
Paglia says she has absolutely no idea
how the election will go: ‘But people want
change and they’re sick of the establishment
— so you get this great popular surge, like
you had one as well... This idea that Trump
represents such a threat to western civilisa-
tion — it’s often predicted about presidents
and nothing ever happens — yet if Trump
wins it will be an amazing moment of change
because it would destroy the power struc-
ture of the Republican party, the power
structure of the Democratic party and
destroy the power of the media. It would
be an incredible release of energy... at a
moment of international tension and crisis.’
All of a sudden, the professor seems
excited. Perhaps, like all radicals in pursuit
of the truth, Paglia is still hoping the revolu-
tion will come.Camille Paglia was a speaker at the Battle
of Ideas in London last weekend. Her book
Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender,
Feminism will be published next year.Book now
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