Camille Paglia: Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality

Camille Paglia takes a look at three new gender studies books about men -- and while she is pleased that things are getting better, she feels there is still a lot of work to do in generating a more even-handed approach to gender studies.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Three provocative books on male sexuality recently published by university presses provide a good barometer of the current state of campus gender studies. A welcome development of the past decade has been the expansion of the gender lens to include men, who were routinely stereotyped by women's-studies curricula as they took shape from the 1970s on. These books reflect that broader perspective and also display a more liberal attitude toward pornography, which was assailed in the 1980s by religious and cultural conservatives oddly allied with crusading feminists. By the 90s, pornography was legitimized as a field of study by gay male academics as well as an insurgent wing of sex-positive feminism. However, despite their greater sexual sophistication, the three books under review still retain 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.

Read the whole review, it's very much worth it.

One of the books, the first one reviewed, has one of the most amazing opening sentences you're ever going to read:

It has been called sperm, semen, ejaculate, seed, man fluid, baby gravy, jizz, cum, pearl necklace, gentleman's relish, wad, pimp juice, number 3, load, spew, donut glaze, spunk, gizzum, cream, hot man mustard, squirt, goo, spunk, splooge, love juice, man cream, and la leche.

Almost like poetry.

Tags: Camille Paglia, Rigid Scholarship on Male Sexuality, media, books, gender studies, culture