Hillary Clinton’s “gender card” politics is rubbing feminist Camille Paglia the wrong way.
In an interview with The Spectator, Paglia tells journalist Emily Hill that Clinton’s claim that her election to the presidency would break the final pane of the glass ceiling is balderdash:
It’s an outrage how she’s played the gender card. She is a woman without accomplishment. “I sponsored or co-sponsored 400 bills.” Oh really? These were bills to rename bridges and so forth. And the things she has accomplished have been like the destabilization of North Africa, causing refugees to flood into Italy… The woman is a disaster!
Having already voted once for Jill Stein of the Green Party, the 69-year-old professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia asserts she’s already voted for a woman for president, so it’s no big deal. Paglia’s view of feminism is light years away from the likes of Clinton and Madeleine Albright, who told young women there would be a “special place in hell” for them if they chose Bernie Sanders over Clinton.
“My philosophy of feminism, I call street-smart Amazon feminism,” Paglia explains. “I’m from an immigrant family. The way I was brought up was: the world is a dangerous place; you must learn to defend yourself. You can’t be a fool. You have to stay alert.”
Nowadays, however, the author of soon-to-be-published Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism finds young girls are protected and coddled as they’re taught to become “helpless victims” when life becomes challenging.
“We are rocketing backwards here to the Victorian period with this belief that women are not capable of making decisions on their own,” she says. “This is not feminism — which is to achieve independent thought and action. There will never be equality of the sexes if we think that women are so handicapped they can’t look after themselves.”
And, of course, that is the image of women conveyed by Clinton and her feminist colleagues. At a recent campaign stop in Haverford, Pennsylvania, Clinton – with daughter Chelsea in tow – told an audience of mostly women and young people that women need taxpayer-funded assistance, courtesy of the government, from cradle to grave in order to survive.
“We have to look at the whole life cycle,” Clinton said, echoing the “Life of Julia” presented by Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012. That campaign initiative demonstrated how a fictitious woman named “Julia” fared better throughout her entire life because of big government policies promoted by Obama over those of his then opponent, Republican Mitt Romney.
“It should not be so hard to be a young parent,” Clinton said in Haverford. “And it should not be so hard on the other end of the age spectrum to take care of your loved one.”
“People say, ‘I can’t get the help I need for myself, my spouse, my child,’” she continued. “There’s just not enough help. Women tell me these stories about how hard it is. They tell me not only do they have no paid family leave, they have no earned sick days.”
But, for Paglia – who is pro-prostitutes and pro-porn – women should not be expecting special treatment. The feminists she reveres urged women to be tough and fight their own battles with the intention of winning them. Her favorite live feminist, according to Hill, is Germaine Greer, while Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn are at the top of her list of those feminists no longer with us.
“I do not believe in quotas of any kind,” she asserts. “If Hillary wins, nothing will change. She knows the bureaucracy, all the offices of government and that’s what she likes to do, sit behind the scenes and manipulate the levers of power.”
A Trump victory, however, says Paglia, will be “an amazing moment of change because it would destroy the power structure of the Republican party, the power structure of the Democratic party and destroy the power of the media.”
“It would be an incredible release of energy… at a moment of international tension and crisis,” she adds.