#also i’m assuming this is camille paglia? if there’s a different one then i do not know them

[rollercoasterwords]

thoughts on paglia?

have not read any of her work so cannot give a firsthand/in-depth critique but. got this ask thought “isn’t she a pretty notorious terf” did a few internet searches & looks like the answer is yes so. would say i’m not a fan lol she seems like a pretty standard reactionary…

[taylor14firefly]

“Can we talk about tarring. That might be the heart of what I want to say here. An old friend on Facebook says she’s outraged I’m voting for Hillary. She says do you realize she was a registered Republican, she’s a racist and a bigot and her and Bill personally supervised the growth of the prison industry, all the killing she did, and my friend goes faster and faster and soon we’re getting a form, a shape. Something evil called Hillary. Someone else on Facebook says she called young black men super-predators. I mean she was talking about gang violence in the ’90s and she said there were super-predators in the black community. Truly bad phrasing, even bad thinking but not the same as young black men = super-predators. And especially not the same as what it would mean today. Can we look at her republicanism: Hillary supported Goldwater briefly in high school. Nobody is actually a registered voter in high school. Yet even the New Republic reports that she has been a Republican. That same year she supported Eugene McCarthy. Later on she worked for McGovern. I did the same swerve. I wanted Kennedy buttons but so did all the other kids in junior high. The Democratic storefront was out but the Goldwater office gave me a giant black and orange poster that I put over my bed. They seemed to be going out of business. I just didn’t have a clue. Bernie Sanders has written about women’s desires to be gang raped not while he was in high school but when he was a grown man. Today he’s against funding Planned Parenthood. So where are all the vociferous sexism charges? We assume he grew away from his love of gang rape and that he has something even better in mind for funding birth control. Older men get lovable and older women get monstrous. We give him a pass. I’m thinking we are living in spectacular times. Not like in the Vietnam era when we watched the war on teevee and seeing it for the first time politicized us, and not like in the ’90s when you didn’t show war at all (“Shock and Awe”) because of its politicizing effect. We now are in spectacular times when we see black men shot in the street in America by cops (though it has always been happening) and we actually see girls getting raped on lawns (which also happened to a lot of us in “the day”) because now everyone has a phone and shares everything. It feels different.

So now information is spectacular too meaning that where it’s a little bit true that Hill was a Republican when she was a kid and she did say something stupid but specific about some black youth, so if we tweak it this way it will stick to the next accusation and soon we have a hovering ominous witchy form. This same kind of conflation produces the emotive and powerful spoutings of Donald Trump as well as the liberationist swagger of Bernie Sanders. There’s women for sure who can play it that way. I suppose I do. And if you ever want the newest version colorful misogyny please try Camille Paglia. She’s got the stuff! But the accumulative sensational style is not Hillary’s thing — she being a different personality type (though ironically for five decades she has lived with the charismatic man.)

Yet now thanks to the combined force of sexism and ageism and the automatic likening of a woman to the moon Hillary remains primarily a reflective figure, just an accumulation of what anyone else wants. Women historically have always been the symbol for anyone’s negative thoughts about the economy (in the ’80s it was Ivana Trump, never, as we used to call him, the Donald) for as long as there was one and today, she, Hillary, readily stands in for the corporate culture. Somehow she is it. Who ever said abstractions are gender neutral in the English language? If it’s evil and menacing, and we’ve got to stop it, it’s a girl!

And now for some essentialism. Right? Do you know what it would be like in America with a woman in the Oval Office. Or for the world. Yet it seems sort of radical now for women who aren’t for Hill to say I’m not voting for someone because they have a vagina. Yeah since 1971 I’ve had the freedom to vote dick, dick, dick. It’s interesting we never put it that way. A man runs. Cock ’n’ balls. No big deal. We’re not going to mention his genitals. Unless he’s done something illegal. But Hillary has a vagina. Certainly a great misogynistic moment for everyone. She has a vagina.”

[emphasis mine]