Camille Paglia: a promoter of pedophilia?
- Thread starter 987baz
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This is very shocking stuff. I was wondering the back story to this video.. In the comments:
This is a public event hosted at the library in Eugene. TRA's tried boycotting it, threw stink bombs and were harassing anyone trying to see Derrick Jensen's talk. Thankfully, it wasn't at a school, and they let him speak because it was a public space, but the TRAS tried to drown out his livestream of the event by being facists that scream and cough over things they dont like.
So if you talk about pedophilia these groups try to shut you down? Kind of tells you all you need to know. These are the people that have infiltrated government, school boards, and pretty well everything else. Of course, at times like this, their masks slip off showing their real selves. Scary. Maybe this needs its own topic to get wider attention.
I find those as difficult to watch and as emotionally disturbing as intentional cruelty - and I think it's the same thing no matter how it's dressed up. The kind of nonchalant and light way they address the subject doesn't help - makes it all the more disturbing and the students in the class seemed to be entertained by the subject rather than outraged.
There's also this:
cassiopaea.org
He is Adjunct Professor at the Australian Research Centre for Sexual Health and Society and clearly on the same team as Paglia.
There's also this:
Australia’s ‘Safe Schools’ anti-bullying program links to paedophilia.
A friend shared a post on fb by a man called Eliahi Priest who had put together a video about the following. Apparently he had to re-upload the video after fb deleted it. His video is here _https://www.facebook.com/eliahi/posts/10156200308254042?pnref=story I’ve tracked down some of the links...
cassiopaea.org
He is Adjunct Professor at the Australian Research Centre for Sexual Health and Society and clearly on the same team as Paglia.
I am not sure I understand correctly. In this video, I cannot make out whether Jensen is either for or against pedophillia.
Is he justifying pedophillia based on the fact that previous queer theorists have argued in favour of it? Or is he highlighting the pathological thinking of queer theorists?
I can't find anything to say he's actually denouncing pedophillia - he seems to do interviews with people where they talk about it in queer theory. In the main his criticism of queer theory seems to be about transgenderism and gender in general from what I can find so far.
Here's one such interview:
Susan Cox 01.29.17
Podcast: Youtube: Hi, I’m Derrick Jensen and this is Resistance Radio on the Progressive Radio Network. My guest today is Susan Cox. She is a feminist writer, activist, and educator in Philosophy. …
resistanceradiotranscripts.wordpress.com
Then there's this which is really weird. He interviews Alicen Grey who has coined the term 'pedophile culture'. By that she means infantilising adult women and having sex with them. I haven't listened to this one all the way through so can't state for sure where it's going.
Pedophile Culture: Derrick Jensen interviews Alicen Grey for Resistance Radio
Derrick Jensen interviews Alicen Grey about Pedophile Culture, porn culture, and the harms of infantilizing women.
alicengrey.com
I only skipped through the video about Camille Paglia after it was brought to my attention elsewhere yesterday, and, because it seemed at odds with some of the other positions Paglia espouses, plus i was informed that the maker also created what sounded like a hit job against Peterson, i did a quick search to see what else was out there.
On the first page of a Google search for Camille Paglia and paedophilia I came across a thesis written in 1996 for the University of Canterbury in New Zealand called: Oddities and Atrocities: A Preliminary study of Camille Paglia. Searching the document, the only mention of her commentary on paedophilia (that i found) is highlighted below:
So is she promoting paedophilia? From the above passage, i don't think so. As a comparison, she apparently doesn't want actual snuff films to be made to 'tackle' that 'taboo', but she is calling for these taboos to be "shattered" - what exactly she means by that i can't say.
So while i don't see in the above Camille Paglia promoting paedophilia, that doesn't mean her reasoning couldn't be used as an excuse to, nor do i necessarily agree with her statements either.
On the first page of a Google search for Camille Paglia and paedophilia I came across a thesis written in 1996 for the University of Canterbury in New Zealand called: Oddities and Atrocities: A Preliminary study of Camille Paglia. Searching the document, the only mention of her commentary on paedophilia (that i found) is highlighted below:
So is she promoting paedophilia? From the above passage, i don't think so. As a comparison, she apparently doesn't want actual snuff films to be made to 'tackle' that 'taboo', but she is calling for these taboos to be "shattered" - what exactly she means by that i can't say.
So while i don't see in the above Camille Paglia promoting paedophilia, that doesn't mean her reasoning couldn't be used as an excuse to, nor do i necessarily agree with her statements either.
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Against. He opens with, "There is a long correlation between anarchism and pedophilia..." and is then shouted down, so he quickly begins a run-down of examples to prove that it is no 'trope' or 'irrelevant', as someone in the crowd apparently suggested.
Resurrection Europa did that hit piece video on Peterson, so I was quite dubious on his claims wrt to Paglia and would take whatever he publishes with a grain (or maybe a spoon) of salt. Although, it did raise some questions as I’m not as familiar with her as with Peterson. I checked up on what RE was citing and there’s really not much out there. All the examples of her promoting pedophilia are over 20 years old. The most glaring ones:
On Ginsberg’s association with NAMBA:
That’s one helluva ‘guru’!
Other than that, there's not much else. The question for me is whether she still has the same opinion now and whether she has changed her stance on it. I haven’t been able to find anything more recent that demonstrates either/or so it’s still up in the air.
All I can tell is that back then she did look to be in support of it and her admiration for Ginsberg is troubling. I hope that's not still the case but who knows. I would like say that her recent commentary on leftist/transgender issues is not compatible with her previous convictions but then again, people are.... complicated.
On Ginsberg’s association with NAMBA:
That’s one helluva ‘guru’!
Other than that, there's not much else. The question for me is whether she still has the same opinion now and whether she has changed her stance on it. I haven’t been able to find anything more recent that demonstrates either/or so it’s still up in the air.
All I can tell is that back then she did look to be in support of it and her admiration for Ginsberg is troubling. I hope that's not still the case but who knows. I would like say that her recent commentary on leftist/transgender issues is not compatible with her previous convictions but then again, people are.... complicated.
It's possible she has since recanted from much or all of what she said and wrote in the 1990s. She certainly sounded, at the very least, like an 'apologist' for pedophilia back then. The quote the above video pulled from her book appears legit:
As we discussed on this thread, that shtick about Greek civilization being fine with pedophilia is probably BS.
This quote from Paglia in a 1991 speech also appears legit:
Now, her philosophical stance is something akin to: "better this all be out in the open where we can see it, than buried where we can't." But boomers like her completely missed - while it was happening - that this only encouraged deviance to ever pathological extremes. There are REASONS why older societies cracked down hard on this stuff.
Her statements in the 1999 Guide interview are legit too:
Oh, just sex-play. Phew! I thought for a moment there that she meant...
Wait a minute.
More from that interview:
Sounds like promotion - nay, ardent activism - to me.
More from that interview:
At this point I'm thinking it's a pronounced case of ideological possession. Note that, whereas she is conscious ('woke', as they say today), anyone not like her is "unconscious." She encountered, in a visceral way, that 'hard-wired aversion' most people have to unnatural sex, and, being an ideologue, went off into theorizing about what was wrong with everyone else instead of critically examining what might have been wrong with her.
Later on in that interview:
Paglia is so 'avant-garde', she defies expectations that she loves the postmodernist Foucault, except in that one area where even most postmodernists cringed: his advocacy for the legalization of pedophilia.
What a sick puppy. 'Freedom' for people like her is the freedom to be a deviant and anti-social bane on society, nothing more.
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Adaryn
The Living Force
Some of the excerpts below were quoted in the video posted by baz:
"Because what is wrong with some mild sex play? What is the big deal? You know I can see forbidding, or being concerned about, situations where a larger man is convincing a small boy to let him have anal intercourse with him. I can see why people might start to be concerned about this, because does this young child I'm talking about a really young child, say, eight years old is he really cognizant about what is going on here, what anal intercourse is. But just sex play? What is wrong?"
"I feel I have a radical sixties libertarian position on this question. I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age. That's the direction I would go right now. I mean the anal inter course thing, that's going to be a hard sell for a thousand years probably. But I would really want to push the issue of what is wrong with anything which gives pleasure? What is wrong with it, even if it does involve fondling of genitals. I would like to force that issue right into the front of the cultural agenda. Oh it haunts them, [they'll say]. How does it haunt them? Where is the harm to the children if they are getting polymorphous perverse pleasure from it, except in the harm as society forces secrecy on everyone and makes everyone neurotic? More damage comes from the enforced secrecy and covertness than probably comes from these mild physical liberties. What's the big deal?"
"I'm so sick of the brainless overpraise of post-structuralist drivel. Michel's oafishly pretentious and phony to boot. I liked him for defending pedophilia, but his writing style is dense and irrational. And that forced Parisian accent that he no longer has in real life because of all the time he's been spending in San Fran bath-houses — ugh!" On Michel Foucault "Ask Camille" at Salon.com (13 January 1997) [note: couldn't find the source article for that quote]
"Contemporary gays who try to distance themselves from this issue of boy-love are in effect committing cultural suicide. They're cutting themselves from all the highest achievements of gay men..... Because I am a woman, and therefore I cannot be charged with man-boy love, I felt I had a moral obligation - and I don't recognize morality in most areas of life - a moral obligation to speak out against this kind of persecution in puritan Protestant culture, this persecution of a sensibility that as far as I can see has been intertwined with the highest achievements of art and intellect since the period of classical Athens."
"In her book Sex and Destiny, Germaine Greer says that the standards for adult-child contact in the non-Western world are very, very free. She says that adults take pleasure in physical contact with children, take pleasure in their bodies, in ways that are considered absolutely criminal here. Now this was an utterly explosive and momentous thesis. I totally agree with it, and I think that an authentic queer studies, one based on scholarship and not propaganda, would be pursuing this issue."
"I have constantly written and said that one of my worst experiences in the media was on the Jane Wallace show here in Philadelphia four years ago when I was nearly lynched by an angry audience when Jane Wallace brought up my defense of man-boy love in Sexual Personae. Her audience went crazy, absolutely crazy. Usually audiences love me. I have never felt such hatred in my life. People stood up and were screaming at me that I'm sick. I was utterly outraged. They were just out of control, the irrational emotions welling to the surface. It was an appalling experience, and I threatened to walk off the show at one point. It was unbelievable to have such hatred focused against one. But that emboldened me even further, because I knew that if you have that kind of irrationality coming out of the unconscious lives of an entire audience like that, that this issue cuts very, very deep, and it needs more exploration, not more avoidance.
BA: It's ironic that Freudian theory, which is one of the givens in our culture, couldn't be more explicit about the sexuality of children.
CP: Now you see this goes to the heart of the whole modern definition of childhood. It was romanticism that really invented these borderlines between childhood and adulthood, and the whole sort of sanctification of childhood, the Rousseauian, Wordsworthian view of the purity, the perfection, the saintliness of the child. Freud, 100 years ago now, postulated his theory of infantile sexuality, contending that the infant is an erotic being from the moment it is born. That theory is still so hot, so explosive, that it has never been fully absorbed by Western culture after a hundred years.
I believe that Freud was more correct that Rousseau's or Wordsworth's view. Most people who study artistic creativity understand that it's an ability to return to the childlike state, to the naive state of innocence and look at things in a fresh way. Part of the reason for the hysteria is that people are still laboring under the Rousseauian and Wordsworthian view. They have this tired scenario of the adult molester who comes to pollute and contaminate the perfection and saintliness of this child.
Parents find it absolutely impossible to imagine that their children are in fact fully sexual beings. They cannot imagine it. Because if they were to fully process that consciously, it would activate the incest taboo. That's one thing that has to be suppressed in the modern nuclear family, which is trapped in these prison cells of houses, completely divorced from the old extended family. A process of repression is at work, a process of denial of children's potential sexuality. As a consequence, hatred and persecution are directed against anyone who would raise the issue.
The child abuse hysteria is coming directly from the deepest unconscious layer of the modern bourgeois mind, and every possible tactic must be exploited to attack that, from every direction. Normally I loathe Foucault, I think he's a fraud. But Foucault did speak out on this issue. All his followers in the academy suppress a lot of this, they suppress the boy-love part, they suppress the part where Foucault said that he was against rape laws. He thought that the law should never concern itself with sexuality. And I agree with him on that. I believe that the law should only concern itself with ideas of assault, and there should be no sexualized laws of any kind, so violence and brutality and coercion can be forbidden. But to sexualize a law, to fine-tune it in a sexual direction, is already an intrusion into real freedom. But of course, these issue of Foucault are always suppressed."
CAMILLE PAGLIA: "As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of its civilization."
"Certainly Allen Ginsberg, my great hero, has spoken out on this."
Ginsberg was a member of NAMBLA.
Here's what Paglia thinks of it: Salon | Camille Paglia
Allen Ginsberg: “Everybody likes little kids. … Naked kids have been a staple of delight for centuries, for both parents and onlookers. So to label pedophilia as criminal is ridiculous.” (1997 interview with The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review)
Again, Ginsberg: “Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in two days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape.” (Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995)
See the whole interview here: Interview with Camille Paglia [about the gay movement]
"Because what is wrong with some mild sex play? What is the big deal? You know I can see forbidding, or being concerned about, situations where a larger man is convincing a small boy to let him have anal intercourse with him. I can see why people might start to be concerned about this, because does this young child I'm talking about a really young child, say, eight years old is he really cognizant about what is going on here, what anal intercourse is. But just sex play? What is wrong?"
"I feel I have a radical sixties libertarian position on this question. I fail to see what is wrong with erotic fondling with any age. That's the direction I would go right now. I mean the anal inter course thing, that's going to be a hard sell for a thousand years probably. But I would really want to push the issue of what is wrong with anything which gives pleasure? What is wrong with it, even if it does involve fondling of genitals. I would like to force that issue right into the front of the cultural agenda. Oh it haunts them, [they'll say]. How does it haunt them? Where is the harm to the children if they are getting polymorphous perverse pleasure from it, except in the harm as society forces secrecy on everyone and makes everyone neurotic? More damage comes from the enforced secrecy and covertness than probably comes from these mild physical liberties. What's the big deal?"
"I'm so sick of the brainless overpraise of post-structuralist drivel. Michel's oafishly pretentious and phony to boot. I liked him for defending pedophilia, but his writing style is dense and irrational. And that forced Parisian accent that he no longer has in real life because of all the time he's been spending in San Fran bath-houses — ugh!" On Michel Foucault "Ask Camille" at Salon.com (13 January 1997) [note: couldn't find the source article for that quote]
"Contemporary gays who try to distance themselves from this issue of boy-love are in effect committing cultural suicide. They're cutting themselves from all the highest achievements of gay men..... Because I am a woman, and therefore I cannot be charged with man-boy love, I felt I had a moral obligation - and I don't recognize morality in most areas of life - a moral obligation to speak out against this kind of persecution in puritan Protestant culture, this persecution of a sensibility that as far as I can see has been intertwined with the highest achievements of art and intellect since the period of classical Athens."
"In her book Sex and Destiny, Germaine Greer says that the standards for adult-child contact in the non-Western world are very, very free. She says that adults take pleasure in physical contact with children, take pleasure in their bodies, in ways that are considered absolutely criminal here. Now this was an utterly explosive and momentous thesis. I totally agree with it, and I think that an authentic queer studies, one based on scholarship and not propaganda, would be pursuing this issue."
"I have constantly written and said that one of my worst experiences in the media was on the Jane Wallace show here in Philadelphia four years ago when I was nearly lynched by an angry audience when Jane Wallace brought up my defense of man-boy love in Sexual Personae. Her audience went crazy, absolutely crazy. Usually audiences love me. I have never felt such hatred in my life. People stood up and were screaming at me that I'm sick. I was utterly outraged. They were just out of control, the irrational emotions welling to the surface. It was an appalling experience, and I threatened to walk off the show at one point. It was unbelievable to have such hatred focused against one. But that emboldened me even further, because I knew that if you have that kind of irrationality coming out of the unconscious lives of an entire audience like that, that this issue cuts very, very deep, and it needs more exploration, not more avoidance.
BA: It's ironic that Freudian theory, which is one of the givens in our culture, couldn't be more explicit about the sexuality of children.
CP: Now you see this goes to the heart of the whole modern definition of childhood. It was romanticism that really invented these borderlines between childhood and adulthood, and the whole sort of sanctification of childhood, the Rousseauian, Wordsworthian view of the purity, the perfection, the saintliness of the child. Freud, 100 years ago now, postulated his theory of infantile sexuality, contending that the infant is an erotic being from the moment it is born. That theory is still so hot, so explosive, that it has never been fully absorbed by Western culture after a hundred years.
I believe that Freud was more correct that Rousseau's or Wordsworth's view. Most people who study artistic creativity understand that it's an ability to return to the childlike state, to the naive state of innocence and look at things in a fresh way. Part of the reason for the hysteria is that people are still laboring under the Rousseauian and Wordsworthian view. They have this tired scenario of the adult molester who comes to pollute and contaminate the perfection and saintliness of this child.
Parents find it absolutely impossible to imagine that their children are in fact fully sexual beings. They cannot imagine it. Because if they were to fully process that consciously, it would activate the incest taboo. That's one thing that has to be suppressed in the modern nuclear family, which is trapped in these prison cells of houses, completely divorced from the old extended family. A process of repression is at work, a process of denial of children's potential sexuality. As a consequence, hatred and persecution are directed against anyone who would raise the issue.
The child abuse hysteria is coming directly from the deepest unconscious layer of the modern bourgeois mind, and every possible tactic must be exploited to attack that, from every direction. Normally I loathe Foucault, I think he's a fraud. But Foucault did speak out on this issue. All his followers in the academy suppress a lot of this, they suppress the boy-love part, they suppress the part where Foucault said that he was against rape laws. He thought that the law should never concern itself with sexuality. And I agree with him on that. I believe that the law should only concern itself with ideas of assault, and there should be no sexualized laws of any kind, so violence and brutality and coercion can be forbidden. But to sexualize a law, to fine-tune it in a sexual direction, is already an intrusion into real freedom. But of course, these issue of Foucault are always suppressed."
CAMILLE PAGLIA: "As a woman, I feel free to protest that men today are pilloried for something that was rational and honorable in Greece at the height of its civilization."
"Certainly Allen Ginsberg, my great hero, has spoken out on this."
Ginsberg was a member of NAMBLA.
Here's what Paglia thinks of it: Salon | Camille Paglia
Allen Ginsberg: “Everybody likes little kids. … Naked kids have been a staple of delight for centuries, for both parents and onlookers. So to label pedophilia as criminal is ridiculous.” (1997 interview with The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review)
Again, Ginsberg: “Prepubescent boys and girls don’t have to be protected from big hairy you and me, they’ll get used to our lovemaking in two days provided the controlling adults will stop making those hysterical noises that make everything sexy sound like rape.” (Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995)
See the whole interview here: Interview with Camille Paglia [about the gay movement]
DianaRose
Jedi Master
Some of these quotes are terrifying and disturbing, especially those from Allen Ginsberg. I think only a sick mind could come up with this, on the other. But I also wonder it isn't pedophilia Paglia support per see, but rather that she takes her stance anti-political correctness way too far and she's anti-"fake" morality. For example, there's a few conservative such as Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell that are pro-Israel simply because they feel that people are anti-Israel due to political correctness.
However, several things give me pause and make me think that she probable does have a twisted mind. As a child, I had no idea what sex meant. If I saw a man and woman kiss I was fascinated, but also disgusted, so are most children. I feel if you can come up with idea such as what Paglia proposed it means that you have no understanding of children psychology and it raises questions about the type of child you were.
Also, the part where she mention non-Western people taking pleasure from child-adult relationship prove to me that she has no idea what she's talking about. I can't speak for Asia, but I know Africa quite well. You hear stories of girls being molested by "uncles" and these stories are family secrets. They are shameful. The only reason uncles or whoever committed the crime isn't called out is because in countries like those anything that is shameful is usually hidden and not talked about. People simply prefer to pretend that something simply didn't happen. Also, while I have heard of many case of males molesting girls, I honestly have never heard of male taking pleasure from little boys.
Also, what needs to be taken into consideration is that in many third world countries, when a girl start having her period, she's immediately considered a woman and it isn't unheard for 14 year old girls getting married or having kids. So, if your own mother was 14 when she had you, you naturally are likely to see 14-year-old girls as women. In any case, most educated people from those countries or those who have been able to broaden their horizon and even most of those that have no education will tell you that a male lusting after little girls or worse boys is perverse.
On a side note, I wonder if someone as ever asked pro-pedophilia academic if they would be ok if their kids or niece and nephew had sex with an adult. I wonder what their answer would be.
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Adaryn
The Living Force
Niall said:
Yes, it's possible… or not. In any case, I think we should be careful not to fall into the trap of "critically correcting" when we're faced with material such as this which points to a pathological mindset (remember Rollo Tomassi? That should have taught us a lesson). I mean, sure you can regret opinions that you once held, or things that you said years ago, but she was already in her 50's when she wrote this, so we could hardly chalk it up to misjudgement due to youth/immaturity. I would also be wary of people who, for the sake of fighting political correctness or "shocking people into thinking" about certain issues, end up (what looks like) promoting really shocking and immoral things, on the avowed pretext of "shattering taboos". I wonder if Peterson is aware of her stance on pedophilia/"man-boy love" and if so, what he thinks about it.
Political Ponerology said:
I was familiar with Resurection Europia's hit piece on Peterson, so I wasn't expecting much substance, but he actually did start delivering at a little over 2 minutes in. Yes, they are old statements and quotes, but they show she's had a history of being a strong advocate of pedophilia. And it's not even like she's just taken the libertarian stance to the crazy extreme, which it looks like she just uses to promote pathological behavior, but she actually speaks fondly of pedophilia.
Not only that, she actually said she supports snuff films. I noticed this didn't really register with me until after examining her statement on pedophilia. It's like this is something so disturbing that it's easy to sweep under the rug. She is okay with people and children being murdered on film for sexual gratification. This gets into the profile of sadists and serial killers. That right there shows insight into the underpinnings of what it going on: it's about the ultimate dominance and control over others (criminal mind), and in the case of snuff films, culminating in murder. That doesn't really change if she was talking about fictional snuff films or actual. All those serial killer cases that we've read about, she may very well see nothing wrong there, especially if it was filmed and distributed. That's as pathological and deviant as you can get. And it's not like such deeply pathological structures are easily changed; on the contrary, they are quite pervasive. And if her stance had changed, you'd really think she would have said something about it. That she hasn't said much in recent years suggests to me that she's just decided not to engage in this topic publicly anymore.
That said, it seems the maker of the video is really presenting this expose to tar-baby Jordan Peterson. Camilla Paglia didn't become familiar with JP until he was really popular, and it could very well be the case that JP didn't know who she was either. On top of that it's not like JP can know the whole body of work of everyone he has a discussion with. We saw that with the Zizek debate. And it's perfectly understandable as he's incredibly busy.
Not only that, she actually said she supports snuff films. I noticed this didn't really register with me until after examining her statement on pedophilia. It's like this is something so disturbing that it's easy to sweep under the rug. She is okay with people and children being murdered on film for sexual gratification. This gets into the profile of sadists and serial killers. That right there shows insight into the underpinnings of what it going on: it's about the ultimate dominance and control over others (criminal mind), and in the case of snuff films, culminating in murder. That doesn't really change if she was talking about fictional snuff films or actual. All those serial killer cases that we've read about, she may very well see nothing wrong there, especially if it was filmed and distributed. That's as pathological and deviant as you can get. And it's not like such deeply pathological structures are easily changed; on the contrary, they are quite pervasive. And if her stance had changed, you'd really think she would have said something about it. That she hasn't said much in recent years suggests to me that she's just decided not to engage in this topic publicly anymore.
That said, it seems the maker of the video is really presenting this expose to tar-baby Jordan Peterson. Camilla Paglia didn't become familiar with JP until he was really popular, and it could very well be the case that JP didn't know who she was either. On top of that it's not like JP can know the whole body of work of everyone he has a discussion with. We saw that with the Zizek debate. And it's perfectly understandable as he's incredibly busy.
