Long Takes

Paglia: What I’m worried about also, in this age of Social Media. . . I’ve noticed that as a teacher in the classroom that the young people are so used to communicating now by cellphone, by iPhone, that they’re losing body language and facial expressions, which I think is going to compound the problem with these dating encounters — 

 

Because the ability to read the human face and to read little tiny inflections of emotion. . . 

 

I think my generation got that from looking at great foreign films with their long takes. 

 

So you’d have Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve in like potential romantic encounters, and you could see the tiniest little inflections that signal communication or sexual readiness or irony or skepticism or distance or whatever.

 

The inability to read other people’s intentions. . . I think this is going to be a disaster. I just notice how year by year the students are becoming much more flat affect. 

 

And they themselves complain that they’ll sit in the same room with someone and be texting to

each other.

 

Peterson: Yeah, well there’s a piece of evidence, too, that supports that to some

degree. Women with brothers are less likely to get raped. And the reason for that is that they’ve learned that nonverbal language deeply.

 

Paglia: Not only that but I have noticed in my career that women who have many brothers are very good as administrators and as business people, because they don’t

take men seriously. 

 

They saw their brothers. 

 

They think their brothers are JOKES! But they know how to CONTROL men, while they still LIKE men — They ADMIRE men. 

 

This is something I have seen repeatedly.

 

Peterson: So that would be also reflective of the problem of fewer and fewer siblings.

 

Paglia: Yes, that’s right. I’ve noticed this in publishing. 

 

The women who have the job of publicist and rise to the top as manager of publicity - their ability to take charge of men

and their humor with men. 

 

They have great relationships with men, because they don’t

have a sense of resentment and worry and anxiety. 

 

They don’t see men as aggressors.

 

 

And I think that’s another thing, too. As feminism moved into its present system of ideology it has tended to denigrate motherhood as a lesser order of human experience, and to enshrine of course abortion. 

 

Now I am a hundred percent for abortion rights. I belonged to Planned Parenthood for years until I finally rejected it as a branch of the Democratic Party, my own party —

 

But as motherhood became excluded, as feminism became obsessed with the

professional woman, I feel that the lessons that mothers learn have been lost to feminism. 

 

The mothers who bear boy children understand the FRAGILITY of men, the

FRAGILITY of boys. 

 

They understand it. 

 

They don’t see boys and men as a menace. 

 

They understand the greater strength of women.

 

So there’s this tenderness and connectedness between the mother and the boy child when motherhood is part of the experience of women who are discussing gender. 

 

Sowhat we have today is that this gender ideology has risen up on campuses where all. . . 

 

None of the girls, none of the students have married. 

 

None of them have had children.

 

And you have women, some of whom have had children. . . But a lot of them are like

lesbians or like professional women and so on.

 

So this whole tenderness and forgivingness and encouragement that women do to

boys. . . 

 

This hypersensitivity of boys is not understood. 

 

Instead, boys are seen as

somehow more privileged. 

 

And somehow their energy level is interpreted as aggression, potential violence, and so on. 

 

We would do better if would have. . . I have proposed

that colleges should allow. . . The moment a woman has entered, she has entered that

college for life and that she should be free to leave to have babies when her body wants

that baby, when it’s healthy to have them. And then return, have the occasional course,

and build up credits. And fathers might be able to do it as well.

To get married women and women with children into the classroom. The moment that

happens, as happened after Word War II where you had a lot of married guys in the

classroom. . . Not that many women. The experience of a married person with a family

talking about gender. . . Most of the gender stuff would be laughed out of the room if

you had a real mother in there who had experienced childbirth and was raising boys.

So I think that’s also something that has led to this incredible artificiality and hysteria of

feminist rhetoric.

Peterson: There’s another strange element to that, which is that on the one hand the

radical feminist types, the neo-Marxists, postmodernists, are very much opposed to the

patriarchy, let’s say, and that’s that uni-dimensional, ideological representation of our

culture.

Paglia: That has never existed. Perhaps the word could be applied to Republican

Rome and that’s it.

Peterson: Maybe it could be applied usefully to certain kinds of tyranny, but not to a

society that’s actually functional.

Paglia: Victoria England, arguably. But other than that, to use the word ‘patriarchy’ in a

slapdash way, so amateurish. It just shows people know nothing about history whatever,

have done no reading.

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Peterson: