The era of “psychological stupidity”

By Tom Quiner

Camille Paglia is a lesbian feminist.

Camille Paglia

Camille Paglia

Pause.

How do you react to such a phrase?

Redundant? No, not fair. (The word feminist has different interpretations. A Catholic feminist, for example, will react to the term differently than a Marxist feminist.)

Liberal? Good guess.

Conservative? unlikely.

Whatever moniker worn by Ms. Paglia, she is controversial. Some of her recent commentaries are sure to infuriate the Marxist/feminist crowd who tend to hate men and believe men can and should be altered by cultural elites, as Ms. Paglia relates in her Time Magazine essay today:

“The gender ideology dominating academe denies that sex differences are rooted in biology and sees them instead as malleable fictions that can be revised at will. The assumption is that complaints and protests, enforced by sympathetic campus bureaucrats and government regulators, can and will fundamentally alter all men.”

Ms. Paglia disagrees, and rips into liberal thought with delicious rhetoric that leaves no holds barred:

“But extreme sex crimes like rape-murder emanate from a primitive level that even practical psychology no longer has a language for. Psychopathology, as in Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s grisly Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), was a central field in early psychoanalysis. But today’s therapy has morphed into happy talk, attitude adjustments, and pharmaceutical shortcuts.”

Paglia’s premise is that men are different than women, which is neither good nor bad, and yet is both good and bad.

It is good because men tend to have gifts that women by and large don’t, just as women tend to have gifts that men by and large don’t. In other words, men and women complement each other.

It is bad because men can to have destructive demons that women do not, demons that manifest themselves horrifically as in the case of missing University of Virginia student, Hannah Graham, who has disappeared. Foul play is suspected at the hands of a serial abuser of women.

Ms. Paglia takes Leftist thought to task for downplaying the concept of “evil”:

“Current educational codes, tracking liberal-Left, are perpetuating illusions about sex and gender. The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind … But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light.”

Or as a Catholic would put it, the real problem is “original sin.”

Ms. Paglia recently ventured onto Dennis Prager’s conservative talk radio show. She uttered something that is considered heresy by today’s Leftists, that “sexual orientation is fluid and can change.”

Think about that one.

The premise of the gay marriage movement rests upon a foundation that says that people with same-sex attractions are “born that way.”

I don’t think anyone denies that some people may be born with same-sex attractions. By the same token, there are credible psychological studies that reveal that significant portions of those with same-sex attractions were traumatized in their childhood, abused in some fashion, leaving behind psychic wounds which alter behavior.

But to investigate the psychological origins of same-sex attractions has become politically-incorrect, says Ms. Paglia:

“Every single gay person I know has some sort of drama going on, back in childhood. Something was happening that we’re not allowed to ask about anymore . . .”

Ms. Paglia has observed close up that different patterns seem to exist in childhood that can influence sexuality:

“I can see patterns that are similar in my background to that of other women I know who are lesbians, but the biggest patterns are in gay men. Every single gay man I know had a particular pattern where for whatever reason, he was closer to his mother than to his father, and there was some sort of distance between the mother and the father, so that she looked to her son as her real equal or friend, as the real companion of her soul.”

Liberalism likes to flaunt words like “settled science” these days, which are code words for censorship of science which disagrees with their world view. Paglia says the same thing has happened in the field of psychological research:

“But now, you are not allowed to ask any questions about the childhood of gay people anymore. It’s called ‘homophobic’.

The entire psychology establishment has shut itself down, politically . . . and also, Freud was kicked out by early feminism in the late 60s and early 70s.

So all the sophistication of analysis that I knew in my college years when I went to the state university of New York – there were a group of radical young Jewish students from the New York area – they were so psychologically sophisticated in being able to analyze the family background.

It’s all gone, that entire discourse is gone.

Everything is political now.

Families are bankrupting themselves, sending their kids to the elite schools to learn a political style of analysis (that says) ‘every single thing in the human person has been formed by some external force upon us, we are oppressed, it’s being inscribed on us’.

It’s really sick. It’s a sick and stupid way of looking at human psychology . . . we are in a period now of psychological stupidity.”

 

 

 

5 Comments

  1. K. Q. Duane on September 29, 2014 at 4:39 pm

    In recent years, Paglia has become the voice of reason in a world cloaked in a feminist dictatorship. She wants the truth, and only the truth, to rule the day , whether or not she makes enemies of her “friends” or not. I greatly admire her sanity, in a sea of homosexual and lesbian, insanity.



    • quinersdiner on September 29, 2014 at 4:46 pm

      A voice of reason is so refreshing these days. Good to hear from you, KQ.



      • K. Q. Duane on September 29, 2014 at 5:01 pm

        And she is a powerful voice. I’m sure her life is very difficult at the moment, as homosexuals can be very vicious when threatened, especially by one of their own, as she exposes the irrationality of the homosexuality. I wish her the best of luck in her courageous journey to bring sanity to this toxic issue. And thank you. After my father’s unexpected death this summer, it is a comforting, and distracting, experience to return to blogging once again.



        • quinersdiner on September 29, 2014 at 5:08 pm

          My condolences on the loss of your father. It is really good to hear from you again.



  2. quinersdiner on July 30, 2015 at 7:11 am

    Reblogged this on A Heapin' Plate of Conservative Politics & Religion and commented:

    I ran this post last September, but it is worth revisiting in light of Camille Paglia’s latest commentary, as excerpted in my previous post.