In the latest issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education (available here; free registration required), Camille Paglia reviews three books: Lisa Jean Moore’s Sperm Counts: Overcome by Man’s Most Precious Fluid; Murat Aydemir’s Images of Bliss: Ejaculation, Masculinity, Meaning; and Angus McLaren’s Impotence: A Cultural History. Paglia criticizes all three books for “retain[ing] traces of the old archfeminist censoriousness toward men : or, more exactly, toward the majority of men in the world who do not happen to conform to the tidy bourgeois values of political correctness.” Paglia goes on to indict the entire field of gender studies:
Gender studies, for all its trafficking with porn and pop, too often paints a bleak, condescending picture of ordinary human life. Alternate views (even from among dissident feminists) are not considered or evidently even imagined. When any field becomes a closed circle, the result is groupthink and cant. The stultifying clichés of gender studies must end. But in the meantime, all faculty members should vow, through their own scholarly idealism rather than by external coercion, not to impose their political or sexual ideology on impressionable students, who deserve better.
I do not see “archfeminist censoriousness” where Paglia does, but in addition to the books, Paglia’s review itself is a good read.
-Bridget Crawford
She condemns the authors for groupthink by conforming to gender-studies cliches, but also derides them for not paying attention to the way things have been forever (in terms of society emphasizing sex differences). Isn’t the latter just a more generalized form of “thinking inside a box” than staying within gender-studies cliches?