Everythings Awesome and Camille Paglia is Unhappy

Growing up as a gender nonconforming entity during Eisenhower s America wasn t easy for cultural critic and bestselling author Camille Paglia. Her adolescence in smalltown, upstate New York was marked by rejection, rebellion, and crossdressingall in reaction to the stultifying social norms of the 1950s and early 60s. So what does Paglia think of contemporary culture, with its openness to a wide variety of everproliferating gender, racial, and sexual identities Not much. I do not feel that gender is sufficient to explain all of human life, Paglia tells Reason TV s Nick Gillespie. This gender myopia, this gender monomania, has become a disease. It s become a substitute for religion. It is impossible that the feminist agenda can ever be the total explanation of human Whether the subject is feminism or the fate of Western civilization, Paglia is no Pollyanna. In this wideranging discussion, she says higher education