“So I heard that you were going to propose to Brandi Svenning at some theme park — When are Men going to learn that women want romance, not Mr. Toad's Wild Ride?”
“Hey, now, be fair — EVERYONE wants Mr. Toad's Wild Ride.”
“ When Equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all Superiority.
That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies.
It will kill us all if it grows unchecked.
The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other - the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow - is a prosaic barbarian.
But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.
We must wear clothes since the Fall. Yes, but inside, under what Milton called "these troublesome disguises". We want the naked body, that is, the real body, to be alive.
We want it, on proper occasions, to appear -- in the marriage-chamber, in the public privacy of a men's bathing-place, and (of course) when any medical or other emergency demands.
In the same way, under the necessary outer covering of legal equality, the whole hierarchical dance and harmony of our deep and joyously accepted spiritual inequalities should be alive.
It is there, of course, in our life as Christians -- there, as laymen, we can obey – all the more because the priest has no authority over us on the political level.
It is there in our relation to parents and teachers – all the more because it is now a willed and wholly spiritual reverence. It should be there also in marriage.
This last point needs a little plain speaking.
Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, Equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal.
But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please – the more the better – in our marriage laws, but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity.
Mrs. Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment.
Marriages are thus shipwrecked.
This is the tragi-comedy of the modem woman -- taught by Freud to consider The Act of Move the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by Feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of Obedience and Humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman's part.
– C.S. Lewis
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:
