A Feminist Defends Masculine Virtues

Feminism arose as a reactionary force.  It was the logical reaction of enfranchised women who wished to change the way women were treated and regarded by the male dominant world.  Feminism at its core, at the very center of the idea, is about a woman's worth and value being measured without regard to her sex, her beauty, or other feminine qualities.  Along the way some branches of the feminist tree came to see men as the problem-an obstacle to be overcome on the way to equality. Camille Paglia is a self described "notorious Amazonian feminist" and has a completely radical view of how our civilization is committing suicide.  In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Camille outlines just why that is; the military isn't popular, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools are neutering male students, the biological differences between men and women are ignored, and sexiness is dead.  Women become androgynous, the wonderful things that make them women are denied. Camille isn't your run of the mill feminist she even has the radical idea in her book Sexual Personae that, "If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts."  Her belief is that the start of this civilizational suicide is that of the entire elite class, finance and politics and so forth, very very few have military service.  The prestige and honor isn't attached to it anymore.  On top of that there's this comfortable notion that people are basically kind and good and the sense of evil and criminality are gone. Camille even hits on what women wear in the street.  While she denies that women are at fault for their own victimization, she does believe that we should all live in a protective mode and be alert to potential dangers.  She calls it 'street-smart feminism.' Beyond feminism is the new p.c. gender politics that is tacitly elevating female values and seeking to squeeze out the physical energy of students.  What's necessary is the "re-valorization" of male virtues.  Women will never be able to be truly themselves without having male values to balance them out.  There is a need for men to be manly.  Men do not need to go to yoga and love watching all their wife's favorite tv shows.  There shouldn't be this force trying to pressure men into being hopeless romantics and give up football and hunting and big trucks.  We need men to build the buildings women go to work in, we need men to lay the railway lines, to lay the pavement for our streets. Men are just as important.  For only in valuing what a man brings to the world can we truly appreciate the value of a woman.  We are different, markedly so, but it is in those differences that the beauty lies.