A more recent interview (2007) where she mentions "man-boy love" (and apparently, wasn't fazed by the reader's comment I bolded below). Her comments are (deliberately?) slightly more ambiguous than in the 90's. "What a tangle web we weave…"
Q: Is the Met overly sanitized?
I had some time to kill recently on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and decided to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which I remember from my childhood as an unfathomably huge and awesome temple to human culture and history. After paying the $20 "recommended" entrance fee (which feels, by the way, sort of like giving charity at gunpoint), I wandered over to the Greek and Roman galleries.
I was shocked at what I saw, or rather what I didn't see -- not a single erection on any vase! I went through all the galleries twice, because I couldn't believe my eyes. And also, there was no reference to Greek homosexuality in any of the textual information on the walls. And honestly there weren't even that many butts exposed -- most of them were turned to the wall, to make space for another case of priceless, meaningless shards.
Every other collection of Greek pottery I've ever seen has demonstrated the full range of Greek sexuality, both in its collection and its education material -- for example, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. If they really want young people to get excited about studying the Classical world, then they are just shooting themselves in the foot as educators by denying themselves the most effective teaching tool imaginable: human sexuality. I almost had a very "Camille" moment when I almost yelled across the room at the museum tour guide explaining the labors of Hercules to a bunch of bored 13-year-olds, "AND THEY ALL LIKED TO -flick- BOYS TOO! A LOT!!"
Honestly, what gives? Do you know what's going on with this museum's puritanical curatorial policy? There were signs up around the gallery announcing a reorganization and expansion of the Classical wing due for a month or two from now. Maybe we could start a campaign to get them to start representing the realities of ancient life and its representation in art. Many other visitors must share my sense of personal disappointment and scholarly outrage. I mean, what's a shy bookish gay lad to do when he can't even depend on the museums for flirtation material?
Yours truly,
Wink L. Mann
A: Thank you very much for this alarming bulletin! I hadn't realized that the great Metropolitan Museum of Art (whose Egyptian collection mesmerized me as a child) has been censoring its curatorial materials.
Perhaps the new Greek and Roman galleries (which open April 20) will be franker about sexuality -- or at least about boy-love, which in its most idealistic Athenian incarnation did not necessarily have a physical correlate. In Plato's "Symposium," for example, Socrates admits he is in love with the beautiful young Alcibiades but declines sexual gratification.
But Greco-Roman art is a riot of boys, boys, boys -- from athletic Attic kouroi to the divinized super-glam Antinous, whose melting androgynous looks would reappear in Donatello's sly, slithery David (see the chapter on Italian Renaissance art in "Sexual Personae"). Every few years, a delicious bronze boy, lying amid the cargo of an ancient shipwreck, snags the nets of fishermen off Greece or Italy.
More interesting, this article from 2017. Not about Paglia per se, but it contains several quotes from her, and the author of the article is wondering why Milo Yiannopoulos was lambasted for a comment in which he seemed to condone pedophilia, while Paglia, who said much worse, flies under the radar. It's a good article I think (I like the author's conclusion), so I'm copying the whole thing:
Milo Is A Rorschach Blot About Whom The Reaction Reveals All
The reaction to Milo Yiannopoulos is riddled with the hysteria of a witch-hunt that will embolden progressives and weaken conservatives and libertarians.
By D.C. McAllister
FEBRUARY 23, 2017
Editor’s note: This article contains graphic descriptions of sex crimes.
The flamboyant and highly controversial Milo Yiannopoulos is out. He’s no longer speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference. His book deal with Simon & Schuster has been cancelled, and he has resigned from his job as senior editor at Breitbart News.
Why? After being asked to speak at CPAC, Milo’s opponents on the Right resurfaced
a video from last year in which he seemed to endorse pedophilia. Milo
has made a reasonable case that he does not approve of child molestation and that his words were taken out of context.
Regardless, endorsements of Milo receded like the tide before a tsunami. Everyone pulled away or basked in his “downfall,” as Bill Maher has done after facing fallout of his own for inviting the outspoken gay provocateur on his show.
“Nothing could serve the liberal cause better than having him exposed,” Maher
said. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant. You’re welcome.” That says it all. It’s not about right and wrong. It’s not about exposing sexual immorality. It’s about a political agenda.
Milo Is Like A Rorschach Ink Blot
My purpose is not to write an apologetic for Milo, whom I disagree with on many points. My purpose is to comment on the reaction to Milo and how it’s riddled, not only with double standards, but with the hysteria of a witch-hunt that, as Maher admitted, will embolden progressives on the Left and weaken conservatives and libertarians on the Right.
Think of Milo as a Rorschach test, an ink blot that reveals truths about whoever is observing him. What’s important isn’t the ink blot, but what the response to it reveals about the observer. The outrage and violence that swirls around Milo isn’t just about him; it’s about those who react to him.
Yes, he’s provocative, contrarian, outlandish, and offensive, poking his finger in the eye of just about everyone around him. But he also conveys a message that the Left finds unacceptable. His attacks on feminism and identity politics, his fierce defense of free speech on college campuses and freedom of personal choice without being policed by those who are politically correct—all of these ideas offend the Left.
They always have, but in the climate surrounding the Donald Trump victory, the Left as a mob is particularly unhinged. In every sphere they are trying to suppress and subvert anything and anyone who propelled Trump into office. The outrage against Milo is not merely one of moral principles regarding a single individual. It’s hardly that—especially from those on the Left. Their outrage is what it has always been—hatred for anyone who opposes them. And Milo certainly opposes them, often and with flair.
Liberals Have Been Exposed, Not Milo
In their quest to ultimately delegitimize the Trump presidency, the Left must destroy the Republican Party, conservatism, and anything on the Right. They seek to defeat and silence everyone who opposes their liberal agenda of centralized control, social planning, identity politics, and their continual ginned-up conflict between the “oppressors” and the “oppressed.”
That might sound dramatic to some of you, but given the violence on college campuses (of which Milo and others, such as Christina Hoff Sommers and Ann Coulter, are victims), riots in the streets, and illegalities within the government itself in its opposition to Trump, I think it is warranted.
This revolution, which has donned the benign moniker of “resistance,” is what is really being exposed. Maher said sunlight is the best disinfectant. Yes it is. But it is not the Right that is being exposed. It’s not a single outspoken individual. What’s being exposed is the Left’s double standards and its divisive, oppressive, and even violent agenda to delegitimize those who disagree with them.
The problem is too many on the Right are unwilling to open their eyes to what the light is showing them. They’re too afraid because they’re buying into the narratives of the Left and even joining with them as they light their torches to burn all dissenters at the proverbial stake.
The Left’s Double Standards Are On Display
The hypocrisy of the Left—along with its real anti-freedom agenda—is on full display if only we are willing to see it. Milo is driven out for supposed pedophilia comments, yet our culture has tolerated this and worse from others: A-list director
Bryan Singer and his reported penchant for young boys, actress
Lena Dunham and her self-reported molestation her young sister,
Roman Polanski and his rape of a child, not to mention the many unnamed pedophiles in Hollywood referenced by
Corey Feldman and Elijah Wood.
There’s also Star Trek actor
George Takei, who spoke happily about being sexually abused by an older man when he was 13 years old. When Howard Stern asked Takei if he had been molested, the actor said “No, no. Cause I was kind of, you know—well, I thought he was pretty attractive.”
Takei: Oh, he was telling me about, you know, how life works.
Stern: And what did he do, did he perform oral sex on you?
Takei: It was a hand job.
Quivers: Was there kissing?
Takei: Oh, sure!
Stern: Who wants a hand job without kissing?
[…]
Takei: It was both wonderful and scary and kind of intimidating, and delightful. I mean, all those opposites.
Nothing has happened to Singer, Dunham, or Takei, and even though Polanski has been held to account legally, many in Hollywood have stood by him.
It seems our culture is more apt to defend the sexually immoral than to scorn them—unless they’re outside the liberal cabal, of course. Except that’s not always the case either, something that should make Republicans who are also attacking Milo stop and reflect.
Libertarian Camille Paglia often speaks on college campuses, writes for magazines, is often quoted favorably by conservatives, and sells books—all of which Milo has now been denied in one form another. Yet, Paglia unapologetically supports pedophilia.
In her book, “Vamps & Tramps,” she says at one point that she
“became aware (when Polaroid photos of a kneeling boy’s golden genitals fell out of a book) of a private connection between a genial aging male poet and a good-looking local youth in his early teens. It was against the law, but I saw nothing wrong with it.”
“The damage from many pedophiliac encounters probably comes, as some psychologists suggest, less from the contact itself than from the culturally enforced stress and secrecy surrounding it,” she continues.
Paglia delights in the interaction between a man and boy, describing one such encounter in graphic terms: “Unlike the art-illiterate anti-porn fanatics, gay men glory in every angle on the sexual body, no matter how contorted. A sleek, pretty boy in cowboy boots spreading his buttocks for an up-close glimpse of his pink anus is an alluring staple of gay magazines. ”
‘Pedophilia Is Just Another Sexual Difference’
Here’s more on Paglia’s advocacy of “man-boy love”:
“Man-boy love is perfectly obvious in the pagan homoerotic art tradition, from Greek sculpture to Donatello and Caravaggio and late nineteenth-century poetry. NAMBLA (the North American Man-Boy Love Association) is consistently banned from gay marches and events. The narrow political focus of gay activism prevented it from addressing larger questions about sexuality. Pedophilia, for example, is yet another indicator of sexual difference, since it applies only to gay men, never lesbians. By keeping NAMBLA at arm’s length, activists apparently think they can broaden their acceptability and sell their agenda, which includes a preposterous demand for openly gay Boy Scout leaders. (What would feminists say about grown men dying to take pubescent Girl Scouts on hikes, sleep-overs and camp-outs?)”
She admits that her views on pedophilia have not always been received warmly, though she has continued to speak, publish books, and write for various publications.
“I was nearly lynched by a furious audience on a television talk show in 1992, when the host asked me about my defense of man-boy love in Sexual Personae. I have no erotic interest in children, but I protest the thought-blocking and context-blind value judgments inherent in automatically referring to every adult-juvenile physical encounter as “abuse,” “molestation,” or “assault.” There are certainly atrocious incidents of genuine rape, which we must condemn. But in some cases the contact is actually initiated by the youth; in others, the relationship may be a positive one, but of course one never hears about it, since the affair doesn’t end up in court. Loaded terminology is self-defeating, since it coarsens distinctions and prevents us from recognizing authentic abuse when it occurs.”
“In Sex and Destiny (1984), Germaine Greer documents the far freer sensuous physicality of adults with children in non-Western cultures but unfortunately stops short of my conclusions. The moment was right for a searching critique of our priggish sexual assumptions in this area, which have been institutionalized by a banal social-welfare bureaucracy. I have been thanked for my views by many men, by letter and in person after lectures, because of their own adolescent liaisons with supportive adults.”
Paglia thinks the age of consent should be lowered to age 14, given the growing sexual interest of young people at that age. “[O]ur present age of consent is far too high and treats adolescents as an enslaved class owned by their parents. Who is to say whether or not a juvenile is capable of informed choice? When does protection of children become oppression?”
What’s Behind the Hypocrisy of the Left?
Paglia has given us more than anything Milo has said on the topic, yet he’s run out on the rails. Why? For one thing, Paglia has been around awhile and has cred with many liberals. As they have always done, they not only ignored her deviant views but embraced them. However, if she were an avid Trump supporter in the same vein as Milo, opposing liberals at every turn and writing those things in this climate, you can be sure the torches would be lit up for her as well. She would be facing opposition greater than any outcry she experienced in the past, which came mostly from conservatives on truly moral grounds.
That’s the goal. Crush the Right. Label them. Stigmatize them. Silence them.
But the liberals have been silent as they have celebrated deviancy at every turn, from Hollywood, to hip-hop, to the Oval Office. Why are they now wanting to shed light on the sexually immoral? Or is it just Milo? Are they motivated because they have deemed him a racist and a misogynist? That’s been going around a while now, with fierce denials from Milo himself. No, it took the pedophilia video to bring him down. Given the history of such deviancy in a “tolerant” culture, we, again, have to ask why.
Why the double standard? Why does a world that tolerates Dunham, Singer, Takei, and Paglia not tolerate Milo? As I said, it’s because the issue is political and cultural, not moral. It’s about the manipulation of group dynamics through social psychology. It’s about labeling one person and the group he associates with as unacceptable, evil, monstrous, and then stigmatizing him so no one wants to be associated with him because they might catch the evil. It’s about silencing him despite our supposed love of free speech, and then delegitimizing him and everyone who stands near him, or even not so near.
That’s the goal. Crush the Right. Label them. Stigmatize them. Silence them. Delegitimize them. Finally, defeat and destroy them. That’s the goal, that’s what’s happening, that’s the dysfunction we read in the response to the ink blot that is Milo Yiannopoulos.
Labeling People Leads to Dehumanizing Them
We live in dangerous times when we fail to see people as complete human beings. Rational, emotional, spiritual, physical, and moral—human beings who are also imperfect. Where they fail in one area, they excel in another. Where they have darkness in one corner, they have light in another. Where they are wrong on some things, they are right on others. We should be honest about where they are wrong, but not blacken the whole with the stain of one spot.
But we too often don’t do that. We don’t see people with that kind of objectivity and balance because it’s easier and more expedient to see them as something other than complete human beings with a myriad of thoughts, feelings, and ideas, endowed with strengths and weaknesses. Instead, we see them as the sum total of their sin, their failures, even their deviancy, and in doing this, we leave no room for redemption, no room for grace. So, with a single word, tweet, video, or thoughtless comment, they are dismissed, delegitimized, and ultimately dehumanized.
What happens when we no longer see one another as complete, imperfect, complex human beings? What happens we see each other only as monsters? What happens when we no longer believe people can be redeemed, that they’re rot that must be expunged? What happens when we see people only in light of our political ideology, pieces on a game board to be tossed aside as if they have no dignity, no meaning?
Step into your worst nightmares, and you will get the answer. That is our future if we don’t change and start treating one another, not as tools to advance a political agenda, but as beautiful, yet fallen and woefully imperfect, human beings made in God’s image. Only then will we have peace. Only then will we all be free to be heard and understood.
