For decades men, particularly of the white variety, have been blamed by feminists for everything wrong in society. But a lesbian/feminist writer is championing men. and is demanding that feminists do the same thing.
In an interview with Broadly, Camille Paglia blasts those feminists who’ve taken over the women’s movement by “male-bashing” as “fanatics” and “borderline personalities.” Regarding the latter, Paglia cites the example of such “damaged” women as feminist Kate Millet for ruining feminist discourse (“her life has been an endless series of mental breakdowns”).
For her, the true role models for male/female interactions harks back to the past, particularly the 1930s, when women actually “admired what men had done.”. In that period, her “idols” Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn avoided sitting around and bashing men; instead they “demanded the opportunity to show that women could match or surpass” what men had achieved.
Applying this admiration of men to the present would make women “truly free” by feminists letting “men, too, to be free.” This freedom for women would truly occur if the feminist movement allowed men space to “determine their own identities, interests, and passions without intrusive surveillance and censorship by women with their own political agenda.”
Paglia sees a class snobbery element in feminism in addition to the male-bashing.
“It is an absolute outrage how so many pampered, affluent, upper-middle-class professional women chronically spout snide anti-male feminist rhetoric, while they remain completely blind to the constant labor and sacrifices going on all around them as working-class men create and maintain the fabulous infrastructure that makes modern life possible in the Western world.”
She adds, “The bourgeois blindness of feminist leaders to low-status working-class labor by men is morally corrupt!”
