Help Me.

Master Qui-Gon, sir,

Wait, I’m Tired…!

I’m trying to keep 

Something Alive, 

and I don’t think 

I can do it…..

Anakin..!!

DROP!!

Why Do We 

Fall, Bruce…?

“And so, this is one of the reasons I think 

Men are bailing-out of 

so much of academia, 

and maybe 

The Academic World in general. 

And maybe,

The World in general…..

"So, part of The Problem is,

Men actually don’t have 

any idea 

How to Compete 

with Women. 

Because The Problem is that 

if you unleash yourself completely, 

then you’re an 

Absolute Bully. 

And there’s no 

doubt about that, 

because even if 

Men unleash themselves 

on other Men, 

that can be pretty goddamn 

brutal, especially for 

The Men that’re 

really tough. 

And so that just 

Doesn’t Happen 

with Women, ever. 

So you can’t 

unleash yourself completely -- 

Because, 

If You Win, 

You’re a Bully;

and If You Lose, 

well, You’re just 

bloody pathetic. 

So, How The Hell are 

You supposed to play 

A Game like that…?” 

The Father, Senex,

Lord of The Dance :

You Know — I’ve learned 

a few things over The Years :

Ye can’t…. 

Ye can’t  make An Omelette, 

without crackin’ some eggs…

What Doesn’t Kill Ye, 

makes Ye Stronger;

We ARE — What We Eat.

You Buy Cheap, 

You Buy Twice.

The Open HAND, 

has The Strongest Grip.

•NEVER• parachute 

into an area, 

Y’ve just BOMBED….

PAGLIA : 

I can remember, still, 

the life of the agrarian era - 

which was for most of Human History - 

The Agrarian Era, where 

there was The World of Men, 

and The World of Women. 

And the sexes had very little 

to do with each other. 

Each had Power and Status 

in its own realm. 

And they laughed 

at each other, 

in essence. 

The Women had enormous power. 

In fact, The Older Women ruled, not 

The Young Beautiful Women like today. 

But the older you were the more 

you had control over everyone, 

including the mating and marriage.

 

There were no Doctors, 

so The Old Women were like midwives 

and knew all the ins and outs 

and [had] inherited knowledge 

about pregnancy and 

all these other things. 

I can remember this. 

And the joy that women had 

with each other all day long. 

Cooking with each other, 

being companions to each other, 

talking, conversing. 

My Mother remembered, 

as a small child in Italy, 

when it was time to 

Do The Laundry 

they would take The Laundry 

up The Hill to The Fountain 

and do it by hand. 

They would sing, they would picnic, and so on. 

We get a glimpse of that in the Odyssey when Odysseus is thrown up naked on the shores of Phaeacia and he hears the sound of women, young women, laughing and singing. And it’s Nausicaa, the princess, bringing the women to do the laundry. It’s exactly the same thing. So there was. . . 

Each gender had its OWN hierarchy, its OWN values, its OWN way of talking. And the sexes RARELY intersected. 

I can remember in my childhood in a holiday - it could be a Christmas, it could be a Thanksgiving, whatever - women would be cooking all day long, everyone would sit down to eat, and then after that the women would retire en masse to the kitchen. And the men would go. . . I would look at them through the window and see all the men. The men would be all outside, usually gathered around the car - at a time when cars didn’t work as well as they do today - with the hood up. And the men would be standing with their hands on their hips like that. Everyone’s staring at the engine. That’s how I learned men were refreshing themselves by studying something technical and mechanical after being with the women during the dinner.

So all of these problems of today are the direct consequence of women’s emancipation and freedom from housework thanks to capitalism, which made it possible for women to have jobs outside the home for the very first time in the nineteenth century. No longer to be dependent on husband or father or brother. 

So this great thing that’s happened to us, allowing us to be totally self-supporting, independent agents has produced all this animosity between men and women, because women feel unhappy. Women today - wherever I go, whether it’s Italy or Brazil or England or America or Toronto - the upper-middle class professional women are unhappy, miserable. And they don’t know why they’re unhappy. They want to blame it on men. The men must change. Men must become more like women. No. That is the wrong way to go. It’s when men are men, and understand themselves as men, are secure as men - then you’re going to be happier. 

Peterson: There’s nothing more dangerous than a weak man. 

Paglia: Absolutely. Especially all these quislings spouting feminist rhetoric. When I hear that it makes me sick. But here’s the point. Men and women have never worked side by side, ever. Maybe on the farms when you were like. . . Maybe one person is in the potato field and the other one is over here doing tomatoes, or whatever. You had families working side by side, exhausted with each other. No time to have any clash of this. It was a collaborative effort on farms and so on. Never in all of human history have men and women been working side by side. And women are now. . . The pressure about Silicon Valley - they’re all so sexist, they don’t allow women in, and so on. Men are being men in Silicon Valley. 

Peterson: Especially the engineers. 

Paglia: And the women are demanding that. . . ‘Oh, this is terrible, you’re being sexist.’ Maybe the sexes have their own particular form of rhetoric, their own particular form of identity. Maybe we need to reexamine this business about. . . Maybe we have to perhaps accept some degree of tension and conflict between the sexes in a work environment. 

I don’t mean harassment. I’m talking about women feeling disrespected. Somehow their opinions, when they express them, are not taken seriously. Even Hillary Clinton is complaining. When a woman writes something online she’s attacked immediately. Everyone is attacked online. What are you talking about? The world is tough. The world is competitive. Identity is honed by conflict. The idea that there should be no conflict, that we have to be in this bath of approbation. . . It’s infantile. 

Peterson: That’s right. It’s absolutely infantile. Okay, so, a couple of things there. Well the first thing is that the agreeableness trait that divides men and women 16

most. . . There’s three things that divide women and men most particularly from the psychometric perspective. One is that women are more agreeable than men, and so that seems to be the primary maternal dimension as far as I can tell. It’s associated with a desire to avoid conflict. But it’s associated with interpersonal closeness, compassion, politeness. Women are reliably higher than men, especially in the Scandinavian countries and in the countries where egalitarianism has progressed the farthest. So that’s where the difference is maximized, which is one of the things James Damore pointed out quite correctly in his infamous Google Memo. Women are higher in negative emotion. So that’s anxiety and emotional pain. That difference is approximately the same size. And again that maximizes in egalitarian societies, which is extremely interesting. And then the biggest difference is the difference in interest between people and things. And so women are more interested in people, and men are more interested in things, which goes along quite nicely with your car anecdote. But the thing about men interacting with men again is that it isn’t that they respect each other’s viewpoints. That’s not exactly right. What happens with a man. . . I know a lot of men that I would regard as remarkably tough people for one reason or another. And everything you do with them is a form of combat. Like if you want your viewpoint taken seriously, often you have to yell them down. They’re not going to stop talking unless you start talking over them. It’s not like men are automatically giving respect to other men, because that just doesn’t happen. It’s that the combat is there, and it’s expected. And one of the problems. . . And so, this is one of the reasons I think men are bailing out of so much of academia and maybe the academic world in general. And maybe the world in general. Men actually don’t have any idea how to compete with women. Because the problem is that if you unleash yourself completely, then you’re an absolute bully. And there’s no doubt about that, because if men unleash themselves on other men, that can be pretty goddamn brutal, especially for the men that really tough. And so that just doesn’t happen with women ever. So you can’t unleash yourself completely. If you win, you’re a bully. If you lose, well you’re just bloody pathetic. So how the hell are you supposed to play a game like that? I’ve worked with lots of women in law firms in Canada, for example. And high achieving women, like really remarkable people I would say. And they’re often nonplussed, I would say, by the attitude of the men in the law firm, because they would like to see everyone pulling together because they’re all part of the same team. Whereas the men are like at each other’s throats in a cooperative way because they want the law firm to succeed, but they want to be the person who is at the top of the success hierarchy. And that doesn’t jive well with the more cooperative ethos that’s part and parcel of agreeableness. So we don’t really have any idea how to integrate male and female dominance hierarchies.

And Behold, it Was Very Good.

So God created Man in His Own Image, 

in The Image of God created He Him;

Male and Female created He Them.

And God blessed Them, 

and God said unto Them, 

"Be fruitful, and multiply, 

and replenish The Earth, 

and subdue it: 

and have Dominion 

over the fish of the sea, 

and over the fowl of the air, 

and over every living thing 

that moveth upon The Earth."

And God said, 

"Behold, I have given You 

every herb bearing seed, 

which is upon the face of all The Earth, 

and every tree, in the which is 

the fruit of a tree yielding seed; 

to You it shall be for meat.

And to every beast of The Earth, 

and to every fowl of The Air, 

and to every thing that 

creepeth upon The Earth, 

wherein there is Life, 

I have given every green herb 

for meat: and it was so."

And God saw every thing 

that He had made, and, 

Behold, it was Very Good. 

Peterson: You touched on this idea of The Destruction of The Works of Art. 

And one of things I really like about reading Nietzsche was his discussion of ressentiment, of resentment. 

And it seems to me that a tremendous amount of the motive power that drives the postmodernist. . . 

Let’s call it - it’s not a Revolution - Transformation seems to me to be driven by resentment about virtually anything that has any - well, what would you say - any merit of competence or aesthetic quality. 

And I don’t know if that’s. . . It seems to me that that’s partly rooted in the academic’s disdain for The  Business World, which I think is driven by their relative economic inequality. 

Because most people who are as intelligent as academics are, from a pure IQ point of view, make more money in the private sphere, and so I think that drives some of it. 

But there also seems to be this - there’s a destruction, an aim for destruction, of The Aesthetic Quality of the literary or artistic work, its reduction to some kind of Power-Game, and, surrounding that, the reduction of everything to something that approximates a Power-Game. 

Which I can’t help but identifying with jealousy and resentment as a fundamental motivator. 

Does that seem reasonable to you? 

Paglia: These professors who allege that art is nothing but an ideological movement by one elite against another group - these people are Philistines. They’re Philistines. 

They’re middlebrow, hopelessly middlebrow. They have no sense of Beauty, they no sense of the aesthetic. Now Marxism does indeed assert this. 

Marxism tries to reconfigure The Universe in terms of Materialism. 

It does not recognize any kind of spiritual dimension. Now, I’m an atheist, but I see the great world religions, as enormous works of art, as the best way to understand the universe and man’s place in it. I find them enormously moving. They’re like enormous poems. And what I have called for - the true revolution would have been to make the core curriculum of world education - the world, okay - the great religions of the world. I feel that is the only way to achieve an understanding, and it’s also a way to present the aesthetic. I feel that the real 60s vision was about exultation, elevation, cosmic consciousness. 

All of these things were rejected by these midgets, intellectual midgets, who seized onto Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault. My career has been in the art schools. My entire career, beginning at Bennington College. So I represent a challenge to this from the perspective of art. It is absolute nonsense, as post-structuralism maintains, that reality is mediated by language, by words. Everything we can know, including gender. It is absolutely madness. Because I’m teaching students whose majors are ceramics or dance, who are jazz musicians, who understand reality in terms of the body and sensory activation. See what happened was, something was going on in the art world as well. I identify with Andy Warhol and pop art. That was what was going on during my years in college. Everything about Andy Warhol was like “Wow!” Admiration. Wow. What happened immediately after that in the arts, 1970s, was this collapse into a snide sort of postmodernism also. This happened in the art world. It was an utter misunderstanding of culture, it seems to me, by that movement in the art world. That is, oppositional art, in my view, is dead. What postmodernism is is a pathetic attempt to continue the old heroism of the avant-garde. 

The avant-garde was genuinely heroic from the early 19th century. 

We’re talking about Courbet, the realists. We’re talking about Monet and the impressionists. People who have genuinely suffered for their radical ideas and their innovations. Going right down to Picasso and down to Jackson Pollock, who truly suffered for his art. 

It was only after his death that suddenly the market was created for abstract art. Pop art killed the avant-garde. The idea that the avant-garde continues is an absolute delusion of the contemporary art world, which feels that they must attack, attack, attack. 

Challenge the simplistic beliefs of the hoi polloi. Excuse me. 

From the moment Andy Warhol and embraced the popular media instead of having the opposition to it that serious artists had had, that was the end of oppositional art. So we have been going on now for fifty years. 

The Postmodernism in academe is hand-in-hand with the stupidity and infantilism that masquerades as important art at galleries everywhere. 

This incredible, incredible mechanism of contemporary art pushing things that are so hopelessly derivative, with this idea once again that The Art World has a superior view of Reality. 

Authentic Leftism is Populist. It is based in working class style, working class language, working class direct emotion, in an openness and [inaudible] of speech. Not this fancy, contorted jargon of the pseudo-leftists of academe, who are frauds. These people who managed to rise to the top at Berkeley, at Harvard, at Princeton - how many of these people are radical? They are career people. They’re corporate types. They love the institutional context. They know how to manipulate the bureaucracy, which has totally invaded and usurped academe everywhere. These people are company players. They could have done well in any field. They love to sit in endless committees. They love bureaucratic regulation and so on. Not one ‘leftist’ in American academe raised his or her voice against obscene growth of tuition costs, which have bankrupted a whole generation of young people - not one voice to challenge that invasion by the bureaucrats, absolute fascists bureaucrats. They’re cancerous. 

There are so many of them. The faculty have completely lost any power in American academe. It’s a scandal what has happened. And they deserve the present servitude that they’re in right now, because they never protested. My first job at Bennington College, 1976. I was there when there was an uprising by the faculty, against the encroachment by the board of trustees and the president. It was a huge thing. It was reported on the New York Times. And we pushed that president out. 

And there’s not been a single uprising of that kind against encroachment by the trustees and by the administrations. All these decades. Passive. Slaves, slaves, they deserve their slavery. 

Peterson: Yep. I couldn’t agree more. I’ve thought the same thing about university professors for a long time. They get exactly what they deserve because they never stand up and say no. And the fact that in the United States - it’s not quite as bad in Canada, I wouldn’t say. . . 

But the fact that the students have been essentially handed a bill of indentured servitude here for their student loans is absolutely beyond comprehension. It seems to me that the bureaucracy has basically conspired to determine how to pick the pockets of the students’ future earnings. 

And they do that by offering them an extended adolescence with no quality control. Something like that. 

So it’s a real bargain with The Devil. 

Paglia: And a total abandonment of any kind of education, actually, in history and culture that has come along with it. The transformation into a cafeteria kind of a menu where you can pick this course or that course or this course without any kind of guidance from the university about a central core curriculum that teaches you history and chronology, and introduces you to the basics. Because our professors are such prima donnas, they can only teach in their little areas. So we have this total fragmentation. The great art history survey courses are being abandoned steadily. Why? 

Because graduate students are not trained to see the great narratives, because we are taught now that narratives are false. 

Peterson: That’s another issue I want to bring up, because one of the things I cannot figure out is the alliance between the postmodernists and the neo-Marxists. I can’t understand the causal relationship. 

Tell me if you disagree with this, okay, because I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist. So I’m dabbling in things that are outside of my field of expertise. And there is some danger in that. 

But the central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena, which actually happens to be the case. 

You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. 

And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of Reality, then it serves some Other Master. 

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for The Postmodernists is Nothing but Power, because that seems to be everything they believe in. They don’t believe in competence. They don’t believe in authority. They don’t seem to believe in an objective world, because everything is language-mediated. So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective: that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. You can attribute everything to power and dominance. Does that seem like a reasonable summary of the postmodern. . . 

Paglia: Yes, exactly. It’s a radical relativism. Peterson: Okay, it’s a radical relativism. Now, but the strange thing is, despite. . . Okay, and so what goes along with that is the demolition of grand narratives. So that would be associated, for example, with the rejection of thinkers like Jung and Erich Neumann, because of course they’re foundational thinkers in relationship to the idea that there are embodied grand narratives. That’s never touched. 

But then, despite the fact that the grand narrative is rejected, there’s a neo-Marxism that’s tightly, tightly allied with postmodernism that also seems to shade into this strange identity politics. And I don’t. . . Two things. I don’t understand the causal relationship there. The skeptical part of me things that postmodernism was an intellectual. . . It’s intellectual camouflage for the continuation of the kind of pathological Marxism that produced the Soviet Union, and has no independent existence as an intellectual field whatsoever. But I still can’t understand how the postmodernists can make the “no grand narrative” claim, but then immerse themselves in this grand narrative without anyone pointing out the evident contradictions. I don’t understand that. So what do you think about that? 

Paglia: Well I can only speak about literary professors, really, and they seem to me, almost universally in the U.S., to be very naive. 

They seem to know nothing about actual History, political science, or economics.

 It’s simply an attitude. They have an attitude. 

Marxism becomes simply a Badge by which they telegraph their solidarity with a working class that they have nothing to do with. 

Peterson: And generally nothing but contempt for. 

Paglia: Yes, and the thing is that the campus leftists are almost p for their rather snobbish treatment of staff. 

They don’t have any rapport with the actual working class members of the infrastructure: the janitors and even the secretaries. There’s a kind of high and mighty aristocracy. These are people who have wandered into the English departments and are products of a time, during the New Criticism, when history and psychology had been excluded. My ambition was. . . I loved the New Criticism as a style of textual analysis. And the New Criticism had multiple interpretations that were possible and that were encouraged. In fact, one of the great projects was Maynard Mack’s series Twentieth Century Views, where you had these books. . . I adored them in college. It was about Jane Austen or about Emily Brontë or about Wordsworth. And they were collections of alternate views of the same thing. The idea that there were no alternate views, and there was no relativistic, situational kind of an interpretive approach is nonsense. But the point was we needed to restore history to literary study, and we needed to add psychology to it, because there was great animus against Freud. When I arrived in graduate school, in fact, I actually went into the director of graduate studies and protested the way ‘Freud’ and ‘Freudian’ were used as negative terms in a sneering way by the very WASP professors. Actually, it seemed like we were moving there. The early 1970s was a great period of psycho-biography about political figures. So I thought, ‘It’s happening.’ All of a sudden 7

it all got short-circuited by this arrival of post-structuralism and postmodernism in the 1970s. So I feel I am an old historicist, not a new historicist. I think new historicism is an absolute scam. It’s just a way. . . It’s like tweezers. You pick a little bit of this, a little bit of that, a little bit of that. You make a little tiny salad, and somehow this atomized thing is supposed to mean something. It’s all, to me, very superficial, very cynical, very distant. I am the product of old historicism, of German philology. My first choice of a profession when I was a child was Egyptology, archeology. Everything I ever think about or say is related to an enormous time scheme, from antiquity and indeed from the Stone Age. And that is the problem with these people. They’re mal-educated. The postmodernists and academic Marxists are mal-educated, embarrassingly so. They know nothing before the present. Foucault is absolutely a joke before the Enlightenment. Perhaps he might be useful to people to talk about what happened after neoclassicism, which, by the way, he failed to notice. A lot of what he was talking about turns out to be simply the hangover of neoclassicism. This is how ignorant that man was. He was not talented as a researcher. He knew absolutely nothing. He knew nothing about antiquity. How can you make any kind of large structure, large mechanism, to analyze Western culture without knowing about classical antiquity? He did not see anything. This was a person who had no business making large theoretical statements about anything. Peterson: Maybe part of it is that if you generate an intelligible doctrine of radical relativism, then there is no reason to assume that there are distinctions between categories of knowledge, or between different levels of quality of knowledge. I’ve seen the same thing in the psychology departments, although we have the - what would you call it - the luxury of being bounded at least to some degree by the empirical method and by biology. It’s one of the things that keeps most of the branches of psychology relatively sane, because the real world is actually built into it to some degree. But if you accept the postmodernist claim of radical relativism, then you completely demolish the idea that there are quality levels that are associated with education, because everything becomes the same. And that seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable justification for maintaining ignorance. You know Foucault, I actually found him the most readable of the Lacan, Derrida, Foucault triad. You can read Foucault. I read Madness and Civilization and a couple of his other books, and I thought that they were painfully obvious. The idea that mental disorder is in part a social construct is self-evident to anybody who has even a smattering of psychiatric training. 8

The real narrow medical types tend to think of a mental disorder, let’s say, as something that might be purely biological. They have a pure disease model. But nobody who’s a sophisticated thinker ever thinks that. Partly because medicine is a brand of engineering, not a brand of science, because it’s associated with health, and the diagnostic categories are hybrids between physiological observation and socio- cultural condition. Everyone knows that. So when I read Madness and Civilization I thought, well that’s not radical, that’s just bloody self-evident. Paglia: Well, you know Foucault’s admirers actually think that he began the entire turn toward a sociological grounding of modern psychology. Social psychology was well launched in the 1920s. The levels of ignorance that this people who think Foucault is so original have not read Durkheim, they’ve not read Max Weber, they’ve never read Erving Goffman. So in other words, to me everything in Foucault seemed obvious, because I had read the sources from which he was borrowing without attribution. Again, I know these people. I, in some cases, knew them in graduate school - people who went on to become these admirers of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida. And I know what their training was. Their training was purely within the English department. That’s all they ever knew. They never made any research outside of that. Foucault is simply this mechanism. It’s like a little tiny kit by which they can approach everything in culture. But the contortions of language, the deliberate labyrinth of elitist language, at the same time as pretending to be a leftist? This is one of the biggest frauds ever practiced. Peterson: So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that use of language. Because language can be used as camouflage, and so here’s the story. I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. So he was talking about zebras, and zebras of course have stripes. And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. But it’s not a straightforward association because zebras are black and white, and they’re on the veldt along with the lions. The lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. You can see them like 15 miles away. So biologists go out to study zebras, and they’re making notes on a zebra. And they watch it, then they look down at their notes, and then they look up. But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know which zebra I was looking at.’ The camouflage is actually against the herd because a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. So the black and white stripes break up the animal against the herd, so you can’t identify it. So this was a quandary for the biologists, so they did one of two things. One was drive a jeep up to the zebra herd, and use a dab of red paint and dab the haunch of the zebra, or tag it with an ear tag like you use for cattle. The lions would kill it. So as soon 9

as it became identifiable the predators could organize their hunt around that identifiable animal. That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. They take down the identifiable animals. So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them. As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language. It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand the system. Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. This is a special technical language. No one else can understand it. Only we can. But what’s absurd about it, absolutely ludicrous, is that these people, these American academics, are imitating the contorted language of translations from the French. When Lacan is translated into English, there’s a contortion there. What he was trying to do in French was to break up the neoclassical formulations that descended from [Jean] Racine. There was something that was going on - there was a sabotage of the French language that was going on - that was necessary in France, not necessary in English. We have this long tradition of poetry going back to Shakespeare and Chaucer. We have our own language, far more vital than the French. Peterson: Oh yeah, the French constrain their language all the time by bureaucracy. Paglia: That’s right. So the amateurism of American academics trying to imitate a translation of Lacan when Lacan is doing something in France - that is absolutely not necessary, and indeed wrong to be doing in English. The utter cynical abandonment of the great tradition of the English department. I felt that the true radicalism was not about adding on other departments, so we have African American studies and Women’s Studies and so on. The true radicalism would have been to shatter the departmental structure. That’s what I wanted. I feel that was the authentic revolutionary 1960s thing to do: to blend all the literature studies together, 

The Man Who Has Never Even Wanted to Kneel or to Bow - is a Prosaic Barbarian

 

“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.

31

 

Peterson:

Camille Paglia : "The Progressive Idea is to Replace Men with Government"

BRIDE

“The fact that it controls us.

I don’t know why all people aren’t fascinated with it. 

It makes beautiful sounds, and it makes a lot of times some incredible light. 

It runs many things in Our World and it’s beautiful. 

It’s sometimes Dangerous, but it’s Magical. 

It’s such a Power and it can make some beautiful images… and sounds.”

- Why David  Lynch 

finds Electricity fascinating 

“My armor was never a distraction or a hobby, it was a cocoon, and now I'm a changed man. 

You can take away my house, all my tricks and toys, but one thing you can't take away - 

I am Iron Man.”

One week earlier......

Dr. Pretorius: 

Do you know 

Who Henry Frankenstein is 

and Who YOU Are?

CREATURE : 

Yes, I know. 

Made me — from Dead. 

I love Dead. Hate Living

Dr. Pretorius: 

You're Wise in Your Generation. 

We must have a long talk, and then I have an important call to make.

Creature :

Woman - Friend - Wife.

HARKER :

You're a Monster. 

DRACULA :

And you're a Lawyer!

Nobody's Perfect.

Ah, a stake through The Heart.

You see, sometimes The Legends are right.

This is not one you can test too often, though.

I only ever have three brides at a time.

HARKER:

"Brides"?

DRACULA :

Brides, yes. 

I think that's The Right Word for it.

You see, um...

 

[ CLEARS HIS THROAT ]

 

....I am Trying to reproduce...

 

...which, frankly, can be a bit of a Challenge when There is Only One of You.

Van Helsing :

He was a Brave Man.

He must have loved you very much.

Mina Harker : 

What is he?

What is Count Dracula?

Van Helsing :

In Life, he was a Prince of exceptional learning and attainment.

In Death, I suppose you could say he's 

The Best of The Vampires.

Mina Harker : 

The Best?

Van Helsing :

The most successful, I mean.

Most are feral, half-mad. 

They rarely last long and yet, somehow, Dracula has found a way to retain his human form and intellect, more or less intact, for hundreds of years.

Mina Harker : 

By drinking blood?

Van Helsing :

Ah, they all drink blood.

Dracula has learned to do it WELL... 

I think by choosing his victims with the greatest of care.

Even in Death, he has retained the discrimination of an aristocrat.

Mina Harker : 

And so he took my Johnny.

Van Helsing :

Come, the Mother Superior will want to lead us in prayer.

Mina Harker : 

I don't see the point in praying.

Van Helsing :

God is Nowhere.

In which case, 

it is up to us to 

Stop Count Dracula.

And we will.

Won't we?

Mina Harker : 

Yes.

Van Helsing :

We will.

Mina Harker : 

Goodbye, Johnny Blue Eyes.

I shan't ever love anyone else, you know.

Van Helsing :

Quite right.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

He doesn't know I can get out of The Box -- 

Don't tell him.

HARKER :

I won't.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

Are you His Friend now?

HARKER :

No. I, er...

I-I.. I work for him.

I'm a Lawyer.

From England.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I think he's made you His Friend.

HARKER :

Why?

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

What's England?

HARKER :

It's where I'm from.

You know it.

You're... Speaking English.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I learnt it.

SHE LAUGHS

HARKER :

How? 

 

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

It tasted fun.

HARKER :

Tasted?

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

Once you are The Count's Friend, 

all languages are the same.

I'm hungry.

HARKER :

Was it you at The Window?

You left The Message?

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I smelt you.

 

HARKER :

You're Trapped Here.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

You're trapped too. 

 

HARKER :

I want to Help You.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

Tell him I'm hungry!

He only gives me scraps.

Tiny little things.

Tell him I finished the last one.

I finished it really quickly.

I'm hungry! Agh!

SHE GROWLS

HARKER :

Look at it! Look at it!

It is The Sign of The Cross.

The Symbol of Our Lord.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I know.

It's pretty.

Camille Paglia : So now Today we have this situation - and it’s considered Heresy to raise This Issue - that Young Women are told, 

‘There’s one Future for you; 

You are a Future Leader; 

You must Move Forward.’ 

For four years of College and perhaps some Professional Classes.  

 

It may be that Young Women’s Bodies are signaling that they Want to Be Mothers. 

 

Maybe there are signals coming from The Body of maybe not-wanting This System of Education that was devised for MEN, being funneled along, channeled along in this mechanism. 

So Young Women feel unhappy, They don’t know why. 

They have no Sense of Identity. 

If they want to Marry and Drop Out of College and Have a Baby, they will be treated as Traitors to Their Class. 

‘What? You are a Future Leader. Have a baby? 

Only working- class women would do that.’ 

I find working-class women, in general, far more rounded as personalities. They express themselves forcefully, they have body language that takes up space. 

 

A Man says something to them on The Street, they are right back in their face. 

It’s the bourgeois girls who are taught that they’re Special, who have to postpone Actual Life for all these years. 

These are The Girls who are misjudged in the fraternity party setting. 

These are The Girls who run for parental protection and hand-holding, on the committee investigating what went wrong on their Date. 

 

So yes, I think that what you have located. . . 

 

That’s Very Interesting, 

 

The Idea that These Young Girls who are so sensitive in College, so unable to handle their sex life, are the product of Older Parents because they went through The Professional Career track. 

 

Yes, and they have not had the experience of the competitiveness and teasing of other siblings. 

Peterson: Also, the thing about Young Parents is they don’t care as much as Older Parents, and that actually turns out to be better. 

Because What You Really Want for Your Children is minimum necessary intervention. And the developmental literature is actually quite clear on this. 

So if you’re at home with your child, The Best Role that you can play is to be there, but not to be interacting with The Child all the time. 

The Child should be off doing Whatever it is That Children Do, which, generally, is playing with other children without it being mediated by screens and technology.  

 

Because that’s how they formulate their identity. And that’s how they learn to play joint games with other people. 

And The Parent is supposed to be there as a recourse for The Child when they go out a little bit farther than they can tolerate, and have to come back and get some security. 

But that’s especially not what happens to single children, because they’re basically raised as Miniature Adults. 

And I wonder, too, like how much of the antipathy towards. . . 

These are dark musings. And I would say, how much of the antipathy towards men that’s being generated by, say, college-age women is deep repugnance for the role that they’ve been designed, and a disappointment with the men. . . You know, you think of those. . . I can’t remember the culture. 

The basic marital routine was to ride into the village and grab the bride and run away with her on a horse. 

It’s like the motorcycle gang member who rips the too-naive girl out of the bosom of her family. 

Paglia: Yeah, there used to be bride stealing. It was quite widespread. 

Peterson: Right, so I kind of wonder if part of the reason that modern university women aren’t so angry is because that fundamental feminine role is actually being denied to them. 

And they’re objecting to that at a really, really fundamental level. 

Like a level of primitive outrage. 

Paglia: Well, what’s happened is the chaos that my generation of the 1960s bequeathed through the sexual revolution. 

When I arrived in college in 1964 the colleges were still acting in loco parentis, in place of a parent, so my dormitory, all women’s dormitory, we women had to sign in at eleven o’clock at night. 

The Men could Run Free The Entire Night. 

So it was My Generation of Women that rose up and said, ‘Give us the same freedom as men have,’ and the colleges replied, ‘No. The World is Dangerous. You could be raped. We have to protect you against rape.’ 

And What We Said, was, ‘Give us the freedom to risk rape.’ 

What Today’s Women don’t understand: it’s The Freedom that you WANT. 

It’s the same Freedom that Gay Men have when they go and they pick up A Stranger some place. 

They know it’s dangerous, they know they could end up beaten up or killed, but they find it hot. 

If you want Freedom, if you want Equality, then you have to start Behaving Like a Man. 

So What We Did is, We gave Freedom to these Young Women for several generations, but My Generation had been raised in a far more resilient and robust culture. 

 

We had The Strength to Know What We Wanted and to Fight for What We Wanted. These Young Women have been raised in this terribly protected way. 

 

So I think in some strange fashion that all these demands for intrusion from these Stalinist committees, investigating dates and so on - it’s a way to reinstitute The Rules that My Generation threw out The Window. 

So I think these young women are desperate. 

Not only that, but I have spoken very strongly in a piece I wrote for Time Magazine. It was in my recent book that raising the drinking age in this country from 18 to 21 has had a direct result in these disasters of binge drinking fraternity parties. 

Let college students, the way we could, go out as freshmen, have a beer, sit in a protected adult environment, learn how to discourse with The Opposite Sex in a Safe Environment. 

And now today, because of this stupid rule that young people can’t even buy a drink in a bar until they’re 21, we have these fraternity parties that are like it’s the caveman era. 

Well of course in this modern age this advantages men. Men Want to Hook Up. Men Want to Have Sex. Women don’t understand What Men Want. 

Women put out because they’re hoping The Man will continue to be interested in them. 

[ Like their Father never was. ]

The Man just wants Experience. The hormones drive toward. . . 

To me, I theorize that the sex drive in men is intertwined with Hunt and Pursuit. 

This is what women don’t understand. 

And if women understood what I understand from my transgender perspective. . . These women on the streets. . . You know, I am, obviously, a Madonna admirer, and I support pornography and prostitution, so I don’t want what I’m about to say to seem conservative because it isn’t. 

What I’m saying is that women on the streets. . . Young women who are jogging with no bra on, short shorts, and have earbuds in their ears, just jogging along. 

These Women do not understand The Nature of The Human Mind. 

They do not understand The Nature of Psychosis. 

And this intertwining that I’m talking about of The Hunt and Pursuit thing. 

They’re triggering a Hunt Thing. . . 

Just what you have talked about in terms of The Zebra Herd.

They are triggering The Hunt Impulse in Psychotic Men. 

"There goes a very appetizing and totally oblivious animal, bouncing along here."

And we’re in a period now where psychosis is not understood at all. 

Young Women have had no exposure to movies like Psycho. You know, the kind of rapists, serial murderer thing and so on. 

The kind of strange dynamic which has to do with assault on the ‘mother imago’ in the mind of a psychotic. 

I think there’s an incredible naïveté. 

These young women are emerging and going to college in this like incredible Dionysian environment of orgiastic sexual experience in fraternity houses. 

They’re completely unprepared for it. 

And so you’re getting all this outrage. So feminist rhetoric has gotten more and more extreme in its portrayal of Men as Evil. 

But in fact what we have is a Chaos. It’s a Chaos in The Sexual Realm. The Girls have not been told Anything Real in terms of biological substratum to sexual activity.

Peterson: No, that’s full of lies about what constitutes consent, too. 

And it’s become something that’s essentially portrayed linguistically as a sequence of progressive contracts, which is. . . 

You know, I’ve thought for a while that we’re living in the delusional fantasy of a naive thirteen year old girl. 

That basically sums up our culture. And I look at all these sexual rules that permeate the academia, and I think two things. 

The first thing I think is, well. . . I know because I was an alcohol researcher for a long time, and you know that 50% of violent crimes are directly contributed to alcohol. 

So if you’re murdered, there’s about a 50% chance that you’re drunk and about a 50% chance that the person who kills you is drunk. And alcohol is the only drug that we know  that actually amplifies aggression. 

It does that in laboratory situations. Plus it’s a great disinhibitor. 

So what alcohol does is. . . It doesn’t make you oblivious to the future consequences of your actions, because if you ask someone who’s drunk about the consequences of Something Stupid, they can tell you what the consequences are. 

But it makes you Not Care. 

And it does that because it’s technically an anxiolytic like barbiturates or like benzodiazepines. And it also has an activating property for many people who drink, so it’s a stimulant and an anxiolytic at the same time. 

And a very, very potent. . . It’s very potent for both of them. 

You know, we put young people together and douse them in alcohol at the binge drinking level - which also interferes with memory consolidation, which of course makes things much more complex - and then we’re surprised when there are sexual misadventures. 

And then it’s also attributed almost purely to the predatory element that’s part and parcel of Masculinity, but a tremendous amount of that is also Naivety and Stupidity. 

Because we expect. . . 18 year old guys, especially the ones that aren’t, that haven’t been successful with girls, which is like 85% of them because the successful men are a very small percentage of men. 

The 85% who haven’t been successful with men or with women - they don’t know what the hell they’re doing at all. 

And part of the reason they’re getting drunk is to garner up enough courage to actually make an advance. 

Because another thing I think women don’t understand, especially with regards to Young Men is, just exactly how petrifying An Attractive Woman who’s of, say, somewhat Higher Status actually is to a young guy. 

There’s lots of guys that write me constantly, and people that I’ve worked with, that are so terrified of women they can’t even talk to them. It’s very, very common. 

Paglia: I take a very firm position, which is that I want college administrations to stay totally out of the social lives of the students. 

If a Crime is committed, it should be reported to The Police. I’ve been writing that for twenty-five years now. 

But it’s not The Business of any college administration to take any notice of what the students Say to each other - Say to each other - as well as do with each other. 

I want it totally stopped. It is Fascism of the worst kind. 

Peterson: I agree. And I think it’s fascism of the worst kind because it’s a new kind of fascism. It’s partly generated by legislation, like the Title 9 memo that was written in 2011. I recently got a copy of that goddamn thing. 

That was one polluting bit of legislation. 

That memo basically told universities that unless they set up a parallel court system, they were going to be denied federal funding. It is absolutely unbelievable. 

Paglia: Incredible. And The Leftists are supporting this? This shows there is no authentic campus leftism. I’m sorry, it’s a fraud. The faculty should be fighting the 28

administration on this. Federal regulation of how we’re supposed to behave on campus? 

Peterson: Well, how can you be so naive and foolish to think that taking an organization like The University, which already has plenty to do, and forcing it to become a pseudo legal system that parallels the legal system could possibly be anything but utterly catastrophic. 

It would mean you have to know absolutely nothing about the legal system and about the tremendous period of evolution that produced what’s actually a stellar system and an adversarial system that protects the rights of the accused and of the victim. 

And to replace that with an ad-hoc bureaucracy that has pretty much the same degree of power as the court system with absolutely none of the training and none of the guarantees. 

Paglia: Kangaroo courts. That piece that I wrote about Date Rape - it was in January, 1991 Newsday - was the most controversial thing I ever wrote in my entire career. 

I attacked the entire thing, and demanded that colleges stand back and get out of the social lives of the students. 

The reaction. People tried to call. . . They called the president of my university, tried to get me fired. You can’t believe the hysteria. 

Peterson: I can believe it. 

Paglia: Yeah, you can believe it. Anything that says to women that they should be responsible for their own Choices is regarded as reactionary? Are they kidding me? This is such a betrayal of authentic feminism in my view. 

Peterson: Well it’s the ultimate betrayal of authentic feminism because it’s an invitation of all the things that you might be paranoid about with regards to The Patriarchy back into your life. 

It’s an insistence that the most intrusive part of The Tyrannical King come and Take Control of the most intimate details of Your Life. 

Paglia: Incredible. Absolutely incredible. 

 

Peterson: And the assumption is that that’s going to make your life better rather than worse. 

 

Paglia: And not to mention this idea of the stages of verbal consent, as if your impulses based in the body have anything to do with words. 

 

That’s -- The Whole Point of Sex is to abandon that part of the brain that’s so trammeled with words. 

 

Peterson: It’s actually a marker of lack of social ability to have to do that. Because if you’re sophisticated. . . 

 

Like if you’re dancing with someone, it’s not like you call out the moves. 

 

If you have to do that, well then you’re worse than a neophyte. 

 

You’re an awkward neophyte, and anyone with any sense should get the hell away from you.

So if you’re reduced to the point where you have to verbally negotiate every element of intimate interaction. . . 

Paglia: What a downer. Peterson: Yes, but what an unbelievably naive and pathological view of the manner in which human beings interact. There’s no sophistication in that. 

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. 

 

So what 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. 

STRAINS

STONES RUMBLE

WIND WHISTLES

SQUEAKING

SQUEAKING CONTINUES

CLAWS SCRATCH

FLIES BUZZ

SCREAMS

GASPS

GASPS

SQUEAKING

CLATTERING

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

He doesn't know I can get out of The Box. 

Don't tell him.

I won't.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

Are you His Friend now?

No. I, er...

I-I.. I work for him.

I'm a Lawyer.

From England.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I think He's made you His Friend.

Why?

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

What's England?

It's where I'm from.

You know it.

You're...speaking English.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I learnt it.

SHE LAUGHS

How? 

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

It tasted fun.

Tasted?

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

Once you are the Count's Friend, all languages are the same.

I'm hungry.

Was it you at the window?

You left the message?

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I smelt you.

You're trapped here.

You're trapped too. 

I want to help you.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

Tell him I'm hungry!

He only gives me scraps.

Tiny little things.

Tell him I finished the last one.

I finished it really quickly.

I'm hungry! Agh!

SHE GROWLS

Look at it! Look at it!

It is The Sign of The cross.

The Symbol of Our Lord.

BRIDE OF DRACULA :

I know.

It's pretty.

SCREAMS ECHO

You assumed, I suppose, that the cross would ward off evil.

Why are you smiling?

Your Faith. I think it's touching.

What happened to yours?

I have looked for God everywhere in This World and never found Him.

Then why are you here?

Like many Women of My Age, I'm trapped in a loveless marriage, maintaining appearances for the sake of A Roof Over My Head.

Now then, we proceed to your miraculous escape from Castle Dracula, about which you have been so vague.

KNOCKS

Somebody! Please, help!

GASPS

STRAINS

BABY GURGLES

BABY CRIES

CRIES

HARKER PANTS

CRIES

GROANS

WHEEZES

DRACULA :

Johnny, this is interesting.

I've never seen it work with a baby before. Never.

I think I might keep it on for a while.

I hope this doesn't mean that 

I'm getting sentimental.

HARKER :

Why did you kill her? 

DRACULA :

Who?

Oh. Um...

Because I wanted to see 

if she would die, I suppose.

Johnny, don't give me that look. 

You were a child once.

You know The Feeling.

Didn't you break your toys apart 

to see how they worked?

HARKER :

You're a Monster. 

DRACULA :

And you're A Lawyer!

Nobody's Perfect.

Ah, a stake through The Heart.

You see, sometimes The Legends are right.

This is not one you can test too often, though.

I only ever have three brides at a time.

HARKER :

"Brides"?

DRACULA :

Brides, yes. 

I think that's The Right Word for it.

You see, um...

CLEARS HIS THROAT 

..I am trying to reproduce...

Which, frankly, can be a bit of A Challenge when 

There is Only One of You.

HARKER :

Agh!

DRACULA :

Oh, Johnny. 

You're just about done, aren't you?

She was a thirsty little thing, and to think 

that she was going to keep you 

in That Box all to herself!

HARKER :

Are you going to kill me?

DRACULA :

Of course I'm going to kill you.

Why does Death always come 

as such a shock to Mortals?

HARKER :

You took everything from me. 

DRACULA :

Of course I did.

You are The High Road that 

leads me to England.

HARKER: 

Why? Why England?

DRACULA :

Ah. The People.

All those Sophisticated and Intelligent People.

As I've been trying to tell everyone for centuries,

You are What You Eat.

HARKER WHIMPERS

WIND WHISTLES

DRACULA :

Now... if you don't mind, I need you to do one last thing for me.

I haven't seen Her in hundreds of years.

Describe Her to me.

HARKER :

WEAKLY: 

Who?

DRACULA :

I've had artists paint Her, and poets capture her in words, and Mozart wrote such a pretty little tune, I-I...

CLEARS HIS THROAT: 

..I really should have spared him, but....

What Does a Lawyer See?

Johnny, in My Memory, She sets behind the second-highest peak at this time of year, and she's quite red.

Is She red, Johnny?

HARKER :

Look for yourself.

DRACULA :

But that will burn me to dust.

Good.

DRACULA :

Fair Enough.

Absolutely Fair Enough.

HARKER :

Will you put me in A Box?

DRACULA :

Keep your eyes on The Sun, Johnny.

It'll be the last time you see Her.

There is A Box waiting for you, in case you Walk, 

yes, but most people I feed off just die.

So you'll probably be fine.

Don't you see? 

An End is a Blessing.

Dying gives you Size.

It's The Mountaintop from which 

Your Whole Life is at last visible.

From Beginning to End.

Death Completes You.

HARKER :

Spare me.

DRACULA :

How? LAUGHS

Answer me. Johnny, how?

How do I spare you?

How indeed, Mr Harker?

Mr Harker?

Mr Harker...

BELL CHIMES

..you were about to explain how you escaped from The Castle.

HARKER :

Yes. Y-you've read my account.

Yes.

Perhaps it will help to refresh your memory.

"Dracula will be served."

What is this?

"Dracula is my master. 

Dracula will be obeyed. 

Dra...

"Dracula is the beginning and the end.

"Dracula is all things. 

Dracula is God." 

What?

I-I didn't write this.

When you were first brought here, you asked for a pen and paper.

You were up all day and all night, and this is what you wrote.

No, no, no, no, no. I-I thought I'd...

You thought you'd written an account of your stay at Castle Dracula.

The only account you've given is the account you're giving right now.

It's time to finish Your Story.

DRACULA: 

Johnny, how? 

How do I spare you?

How?

[WEAKLY]

Let me go.

DRACULA :

You know why I'm going to England.

You know that I'm going to kill people.

A lot of them. 

As many as I need. And perhaps even more.

But...

COUGHS

..I won't...

DRACULA :

You won't what?

Oh, you won't tell anyone about me? 

Or try to stop me?

You'll just let me slaughter all those innocents, no questions asked?

LAUGHS

Some lawyer you turned out to be, Johnny!

I promise.

I...I swe...

I...I swear.

I... I...

I swear.

All right, then.

Do that.

GASPING: 

What?

DRACULA :

Swear.

I'm going to England to Destroy Everything and Everyone You Love,

but if you give me your word that you won't try to stop me...

..I'll spare you.

It's a trick.

DRACULA :

Give me Your Word.

SOBBING: 

No... You're going to kill me anyway.

DRACULA :

Look me in the eye and give me your word.

HARKER :

Count Dracula...

..I give you my word.

If you let me out of this place...

..if you let me live...

..then I...

..then I will do everything in my power to stop you.

DRACULA :

Quite right.

That's My Johnny.

Welcome to The Mountaintop.

BONES CRUNCH

I'm not breathing.

Sometimes you do, but I think it's mostly habit.

You have no heartbeat, either.

I'm dead.

Undead.

But apparently, not yet a vampire.

One must cling on to any good news that there is.

WOLF HOWLS IN THE DISTANCE

I do not serve Dracula.

No, but he's in your mind.

The Question is, 

Why are You Not in One of His Boxes?

I don't know.

It's not something one ever anticipates asking, but what happened AFTER you were murdered?

DRACULA :

Oh, my goodness, that was quick.

WHEEZES AND GASPS

Johnny, Johnny, Johnny...

Usually, people have a lie-down first.

GASPS

DRACULA CHUCKLES

You're going to be a lively one, aren't you?

You came back so quickly. That was impressive.

You even have the beginnings of A Will of Your Own.

None of The Others have much beyond hunger, but look at you go!

Well, don't you see? 

This changes everything.

Stay. Stay!

You could be My Finest Bride.

The Others just became Beasts, but you've kept Your Spirit.

Johnny, You're Like Me.

I am not like you!

PIERCING SCREAM

SCREAMING CONTINUES

SCREAMING ECHOES

That's everything. That's...

That's all I remember.

But why did he scream? What did you do?

Nothing, I did nothing. I...

I looked at him, and the next thing I remember was that I was here.

Oh, yes, yes, never mind that.

We know what happened next. No, I...

I don't... I don't remember.

The river bore you out to sea, and the fishermen found you, caught in their net.

A drowned man walking and talking arouses a certain amount of curiosity, and you were brought to me, babbling of a girl called Mina whose face you had forgotten and an Evil Count who had stolen Your Soul.

Why was I brought to you?

I am known to have some expertise in the realm of witchcraft and the occult.

You're a nun!

We can discuss my imperfectly suppressed fascination with everything Dark and Evil another time.

For now, we will focus on why Dracula screamed.

HARKER SIGHS

You were facing the sun!

Yes.

I have sought to find God all my life, 

and never found a sign of him anywhere.

Why now? Why you? Why him?

I don't understand.

Then, think!

Count Dracula fears the cross.

He fears the symbol of our Lord.

The girl didn't. Never mind the girl. She was nothing.

Dracula, prince among vampires, fears the cross.

Do you understand what that means?

No. Tell me.

God is Real.

God is Real, and I've found him at last.

HARKER :

You have found the Devil.

 

If it takes the Devil to bring me to my Lord, 

then I say, "Bring on the Devil!"

SCOFFS

I don't!

And why not?

God Saved You for A Reason, don't you think?

HARKER :

I'm Not Saved!

I'm Nothing.

Would Mina think that?

HARKER :

If she could see me, yes, she would.

Look at me.

HARKER :

I can't even remember her face.

Yes. I think you have proven that to our satisfaction.

SISTER ANGELA WEEPS

Mr Harker, I apologise for The Deception.

It was necessary she heard The Story from your own lips.

You may have forgotten your fiancee's face...

..but I have not lost you yet.