Not long ago, feminist scholar and activist Camille Paglia made waves when she excoriated those who insist on the use of genderless pronouns:

“How dare you, you sniveling little maniac, tell us how we’re going to use pronouns. Go take a hike!” 

Now Paglia is back with some more surprising – and politically incorrect – statements concerning the effects of feminism on the current generation. In a recent interview with The Washington Free Beacon, Paglia first notes where feminism went wrong:

“Second-wave feminism went off the track when it started to demonize men and blame them for all the evils in human history. It’s a neurotic world-view that was formulated in too many cases by women (including Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett) with troubled childhoods in unstable homes. First-wave feminism, in contrast, focused on systemic social problems that kept women in secondary or dependent status.”

According to Paglia, today’s feminists have veered off course and gone about their ascent to power in the wrong way. The true, historic, and admirable feminists “never indulged in the tiresome, snippy rote male-bashing that we constantly hear from today’s feminists.”

The outcomes of this male-bashing, Paglia notes, are not only harming men, but women as well. Instead of training them to dream big, grow up, and conquer the world, it handicaps and turns them into weak and silly women:

“What I am saying throughout my work is that girls who are indoctrinated to see men not as equals but as oppressors and rapists are condemned to remain in a permanently juvenile condition for life. They have surrendered their own personal agency to a poisonous creed that claims to empower women but has ended by infantilizing them. Similarly, boys will have no motivation to mature if their potential romantic partners remain emotionally insecure, fragile, and fearful, forever looking to parental proxies (like campus grievance committees or government regulators) to make the world safe for them.”

Is Paglia on to something? If we want to raise the next generation to be adults, are we going to have to stop training them in philosophies which continually shift the blame to others? 

Image Credit: Bring Back Words via Flickr bit.ly/1jxQJMa