Why are today’s students being overprotected and sheltered from the harsher realities of history and current events? In the continuation of this series, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia give their take on trigger warnings, victim blaming, and the role of danger in sexuality.
CP: When you’re not exposed to complex works of art like Dostoyevski, for example, then you end up with the simplistic view of human life. You see this utopian view. Everything is butterflies and birds and so on.
The dark side of human existence is completely missing from these people’s experience or study. Now our generation was more realistic because our parents were part of the Depression, of World War II. The Holocaust was huge.
CHS: Absolutely
CP: We had a sense of reality, of what is important, and of what it barbaric in human history. This idea that you can micro-manage reality down to the pleasant is this kind of Doris Day view of existence. It’s so reactionary! People don’t realize it’s sentimental, it’s middle brow — it does not belong on college campus.
CHS: And they’re so sanctimonious about it. Their sanctimony is enough to drive you mad.
What the students are doing now — this is at Oxford University — the young women are demanding trigger warnings for anything that’s violent or unpleasant in a classroom.
I’m thinking — again — trigger warnings in a history class?
CP: And also law! Anything that has to do with rape cases, they had to have a trigger warning.
CHS: There’s a group of professors at Harvard Law school who are opposed to it because they have young women that are going to be studying law, for some of them to be litigators, but they do not want to hear even the word “violate”
They’ve been asked to excise upsetting terms.
What kind of world are we going to have when these people graduate?
CP: It’s so very aggressive. It’s like the era of the Hollywood studio production code when violence was also censored down, not just sex. That’s why Alfred Hitchcock Psycho in 1963 changed modern and opened it to all kinds of representation of the reality of human existence.
From what I can see, most feminists seem to lack a sense of psychopathology. They don’t understand the most extreme manifestations of human psychology.They think they can micro manage everything. They think that they can somehow fine tune the entire world to be entirely safe.
The world will never be entirely safe. For any human being — male or female. The idea that somehow a girl going out at night, alone, as long as everyone graduates from an elite school, is someone protected against an attacks from a maniac…
CHS: … from a psychopath! And if you tell a young woman: “You should not binge drink and then go out and walk around.. You’re calling danger.”
“Oh, Well tell men not to rape, don’t tell us what we have to wear.”
CP: Blaming the victim! If you try to give good advice to be street smart about how you dress and how you behave, to be aware and to handle yourself in a potentially dangerous environment, that’s called “blaming the victim”
CHS: And it’s absolutely crazy! Men are not predators, but there ARE predators among men.
CP: They are truly insane people. The human mind remains primitive. It remains half-animal. Of course, if you completely remove biology from your consideration…
CHS: Which is the first thing they do!
CP:…then you’re gonna end up with this girl scout view…
CHS: Because it’s all “socially constructed.”
CP: They’re in this fantasy world. They think that they can produce this sexual utopia, when in reality all of the excitement and interest of sexual relations comes from potential danger. Guess what? Gay men have known this for thousands of years. They go out everywhere around the world and court danger and death. Every time they pick up a rough trade on the street, it happens all the time. Do you hear gay men complaining all the time? Gay men trying to micro manage their entire world so they can pick up strangers in bus terminals without dangers? No, they find the danger a kick! So why is it that men have this kind of more sophisticated sexuality, but no girls are still children. We must always protect them. They’re “tender flowers.” That’s so regressive! It’s not feminism — nor is it modernism
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In this sixth part, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia explore the origins of the feminist theory of the “male gaze” and discuss the differences between objectification and admiration.
CHS: Feminism is full of so many bad ideas that should have been laughed out of court. For example, this idea of the “male gaze'”— this idea that woman is treated as object, passive…
CP: It’s Laura Mulvey’s idea from the 1970s
CHS: Exactly!
CP: It absolutely polluted film criticism. And Laura Mulvey is a very nice person, I’ve met her at the British Film Institute in London…
CHS: I think she’s changed a little bit.
CP: …but she knows nothing about the visual arts. You cannot just weigh into film criticism and start talking about the “male gaze” without knowing something about the history of art and of perspective and vision. The “male gaze” is a foolish idea that should have long been discarded.
CHS: And it’s not as if in gay culture, we don’t find the “male gaze”. Gay males enjoy looking at pictures of beautiful idealized…
CP:…and there you’ve just disproved this stupid theory, because when gay men know look at a beautiful young man they know that they’re not creating some sort of powerful subordination. They know that they are looking up in admiration at that beauty. It has been part of Western art since the Greeks for heaven’s sake!
CHS: And men look at women. And yes they’re enjoying it, but they’re also often intimidated.
CP: Very intimidated. Biologically it appears to be that the visual apparatus is much more connected to male sexuality than it is in female terms. This is what women don’t understand. They think they can put on every kind of sexy costume and it’s merely decor; that it does not carry its own message. Because they don’t see things as visually as men do.
I don’t know whether I have the male gaze or what but I totally understand it. There is a charge in a female sexuality! Young women today want to yield the power of female sexuality without then accepting any of the consequences of it.
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In this seventh part, Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia discuss the increasing fragmentation of the college curriculum, the consequences of abandoning a core foundation of Western thought, and the demonization of dissenting opinions in the modern-day classroom.
CHS: Back in the 1990s, when we were winning the argument and had the support of the media — there were all these great writers on our side; pro-free speech — it was taken for granted. People would make fun of courses. They were looking at the MLA and there would be these silly courses on “Cross-dressing in medieval Valencia”, “Homo-eroticism in the early Jane Austen.” It was fun. But then the media got a little tired of it and thought it had gone away. But it didn’t go away! It got much worse!!
Look at the curriculum now — the courses that kids take. On Twitter, there’s a profile called “Peer Review” and all he does is report abstracts in journals. It’s so shocking… and it never ends. And you think they’ve reached the ultimate of madness. Just to give an example — and this isn’t the worse — there was an article in there called “Feminist Glaciology”: its a feminist study of glaciers, drawing on feminist post-colonialism and feminist political ecology. WHAT are these fields?WHAT do they read? It must just be slogans mixed with a little propaganda, a little paranoia thrown in.
One course after the other! Are they taking history of Western Civilization? Are there learning about art? Do they know major historical figures? No, but they could talk about these arcane little propagandistic topics.
CP: Yeah but the core curriculum was abandoned, as these new micro-fields came in: women studies, African American studies and so on. Identity politics changed the curriculum in the 1970s. All of the sudden the history of Western Art — well, that’s classist, its racist, we have to abandon that. So what we have now is a whole generation — if not two — of graduate students who are incapable of teaching in a broad narrative way. The old wonderful survey courses.
Now what I’m calling for is an attack upon the curriculum — a reduction by 60% of all these silly electives — and a compulsory return to teaching within this core ideas, that are oriented toward ancient to modern. Another thing — in addition to what you just mentioned — the fragmentation is that here are too many courses now are dated in the present, after the Enlightenment, or even after the 1900s century. So you have a real imbalance in the curriculum.
Young people have no sense of ancient civilizations and the way they rose and fell overtime. They have not idea of the world. They think all the evils of the world are isolated in Western culture. They have no idea about the atrocities and oppression of empires all over the world.
I discovered in my students coming from a broad range of preparations (now and then there will be a private school student but mainly they come from good suburban schools or from bad inner city schools) and they know absolutely nothing about the chronology of human life. Hence they look around them and see things that are flawed in our current system. And they believe that these flaws can be fixed in all the cultures in the history of the world, or some paradise on earth.
CHS: This is naive!
CP: When we are actually enjoying the most liberties ever as women.
CHS: All these students that are hostile to the United states because it’s a capitalist-cis-hetero-patriarchal-oppressive-imperialist system. These sort of terms are taken seriously. Yeah but compared to what? What other country? We’re far from perfect, we’re a struggling democracy that’s done more to address racism and classism and sexism than any country I’m aware of. But it’s almost as if they don’t know that. They don’t know that we’ve experimented with systems that don’t have free markets and they didn’t work out very well. The students don’t seem to know that. They don’t know the history of Communism.
CP: They have no sense of economics or of economic theory
CHS: What astonishes me — as someone who;s been a professor for many years — I always thought that was a sacred commandment: Thou Shall Teach Both Sides of the Argument. So in any Philosophy class, whatever we were studying I would make sure to bring the best of what was thought and said on both sides. Well in these classrooms, especially Anthropology, Sociology — not Philosophy, Philosophy is so far its immune to this, its has other problems…
CP: Literature
CHS: Yes literature, and of course gender studies. All the ethnic studies classes. It’s largely one point of view, I mean they have their doctrinal feuds, but it’s the gamut from A to B. They leave out all other perspectives: conservatives aren’t there, heaven forbid libertarian perspectives aren’t there. Common sense has no place. So the students have this sense that they’ve been exposed to what they take to be settled knowledge. But it’s not settled!
This video is courtesy of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
AEI is a non-partisan public policy think-tank dedicated to research and education on issues of government, politics, economics and social welfare. You can like them on Facebook and follow them on Twitter.