Camille
Paglia: The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil
Paglia is the author of Glittering
Images: A Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars. This article is from
Time Magazine
The disappearance of University of
Virginia sophomore Hannah Graham two weeks ago is the latest in a long series
of girls-gone-missing cases that often end tragically. A 32-year-old, 270-pound
former football player who fled to Texas has been returned to Virginia and
charged with “abduction with intent to defile.” At this date, Hannah’s fate and
whereabouts remain unknown.
Wildly overblown claims about an
epidemic of sexual assaults on American campuses are obscuring the true danger
to young women, too often distracted by cellphones or iPods in public places:
the ancient sex crime of abduction and murder. Despite hysterical propaganda
about our “rape culture,” the majority of campus incidents being carelessly
described as sexual assault are not felonious rape (involving force or drugs)
but oafish hookup melodramas, arising from mixed signals and imprudence on both
sides.
Colleges should stick to academics and
stop their infantilizing supervision of students’ dating lives, an
authoritarian intrusion that borders on violation of civil liberties. Real
crimes should be reported to the police, not to haphazard and ill-trained
campus grievance committees.
Too many young middleclass women,
raised far from the urban streets, seem to expect adult life to be an extension
of their comfortable, overprotected homes. But the world remains a wilderness.
The price of women’s modern freedoms is personal responsibility for vigilance
and self-defense.
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.
The horrors and atrocities of history
have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can
be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive
outside structures that must be smashed and remade. 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.
Liberalism lacks a profound sense of
evil — but so does conservatism these days, when evil is facilely projected
onto a foreign host of rising political forces united only in their rejection
of Western values. Nothing is more simplistic than the now rote use by
politicians and pundits of the cartoonish label “bad guys” for jihadists, as if
American foreign policy is a slapdash script for a cowboy movie.
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.
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.
There is a ritualistic symbolism at
work in sex crime that most women do not grasp and therefore cannot arm
themselves against. It is well-established that the visual faculties play a bigger
role in male sexuality, which accounts for the greater male interest in
pornography. The sexual stalker, who is often an alienated loser consumed with
his own failures, is motivated by an atavistic hunting reflex. He is called a
predator precisely because he turns his victims into prey.
Sex crime springs from fantasy,
hallucination, delusion, and obsession. A random young woman becomes the
scapegoat for a regressive rage against female sexual power: “You made me do
this.” Academic clichés about the “commodification” of women under capitalism
make little sense here: It is women’s superior biological status as magical
life-creator that is profaned and annihilated by the barbarism of sex crime.
Misled by the naive optimism and “You
go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal
eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes
are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and
twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization
and the constant nearness of savage nature.
Paglia is the author of Glittering Images: A
Journey Through Art From Egypt to Star Wars.
Posters Comment: Even Marines are taught the value of the "buddy system".
Posters Comment: Even Marines are taught the value of the "buddy system".
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