Feminism: Hillary-ous

Camille Paglia is the favorite feminist of conservatives, though she’s not a conservative. The reason they like her is that she periodically takes aim at sacred liberal cows and slaughters them with abandon. She’s done that again in a wide ranging interview, which is interesting for several points, including her depants(suit)ing of Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, the headline grabber from the interview is Paglia taking down Hillary: “It remains baffling how anyone would think that Hillary Clinton is our party’s best chance.” She notes in particular that Hillary has no qualifications whatsoever and a history that doesn’t really inspire:

“She has more sooty baggage than a 90-car freight train. And what exactly has she ever accomplished – beyond bullishly covering for her philandering husband?”

She also slams Hillary for failing in the one instance where she actually had some authority, i.e. Benghazi, though her criticism does strike me as a little off in this regard – she says Hillary should have resigned, which seems politically unrealistic. In any event, it’s interesting to see a liberal point out that the Empress has no pantsuit.

Anyway, more interesting was what Paglia said about feminism. Paglia is a feminist, but isn’t a traditional feminist. She’s part of a different group of feminists who really don’t like the people we normally think of as feminists. In fact, when she first appeared on the radar screen, it was in her struggles against the feminists, who were at the peak of their power in the 1990s. And what she notes now is something we’ve pointed out before here: feminism is dead.

“Oh, feminism is still alive? Thanks for the tip! It sure is invisible, except for the random whine from some maleducated product of the elite schools who’s found a plush berth in glossy magazines.”

That is exactly right. The feminism Rush called “Femi-nazis,” which was born in the 1960s and peaked when it dominated academia, Hollywood and the nation’s universities in the 1990s is dead except for a couple random whiners, and the ideology it constructed has been abandoned. I love this quote in particular: “They keep dusting Steinem off and trotting her out to pin awards on her, but she’s the walking dead.”

It’s interesting to have a real insider confirm this and put a reason to it (one of which actually matches my Fifty Shades argument as you’ll see in a moment). So what reason does she give for feminism being dead? Partisanship is the big reason, and puritanicalism.

According to Paglia, feminism got crushed because “[t]heir shameless partisanship eventually doomed those Stalinist feminists.” In other words, they became so aligned with the Democratic Party that they became just another interest group and lost the respect of the public at large. Unions made this mistake too. Both unions and feminists decided they could get what they wanted through the Democratic Party rather than trying to win the public. Thus, they stopped pressuring everyone but Democrats. This destroyed their “moral authority” because they came to be seen as partisan rather than principled. In other words, rather than their cause being about equality for women, people came to see the cause of feminism as being the election of Democrats. So whether or not they were right as a matter of principle no longer mattered.

Indeed, Paglia notes that this is a continuing problem today:

“While it’s a big relief not to have feminist bullies sermonizing from every news show anymore, the leadership vacuum is alarming. It’s very distressing, for example, that the atrocities against women in India — the shocking series of gang rapes, which seem never to end — have not been aggressively condemned in a sustained way by feminist organizations in the U.S. . . The true mission of feminism today is not to carp about the woes of affluent Western career women but to turn the spotlight on life-and-death issues affecting women in the Third World.”

Paglia doesn’t specifically connect this dot to partisanship, but that is the logical cause of what she notes. Since feminists have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party and since the Democratic Party has aligned itself with “people of color” against white males, Christians, and the West, it goes against party politics to criticize things like Muslim atrocities or to point out that the rest of the world is a racist, sexist sh*thole. Hence, feminists have remained deafeningly silent about various atrocities as they instead focused their energies on things like getting healthplans to pay for condoms for rich girls. Because of this, feminists have squandered their credibility because it’s clear they are no longer about “women,” they are about “Democrats,” just like unions are no longer about workers, they are about Democrats.

In addition to the above, Paglia adds the following. First, she notes that old-school feminists were puritanical. Indeed, they worked hand in hand with the Religious Right in the 1990s to try to stop pornography. And in the process, they alienated the vast, vast, vast majority of women because women aren’t actually opposed to sex like those feminists thought they were. To the contrary, most kind of like it. Of this, Paglia says that these “Stalinist feminists. . . were trampled by the pro-sex feminist stampede of the early ‘90s.” This is my Fifty Shades point. Feminism imploded because it tried to impose a condition that ran counter to what women wanted, so they rebelled.

So what are the takeaways? Well, feminism is dead, at least in the form it took until the 1990s. It died because it lost the public through partisanship and it lost women through being puritanical, and those womyn are relegated to history and a few pointless academic posts at this point. It also explains why modern feminists won’t speak out for women today, not in any serious context, and why they are unlikely to regain any influence with the public any time soon. Finally, Paglia confirms that even liberals recognize that Hillary is an empty pantsuit.