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The Current Transcript for August 1, 2017

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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[Sound: Missile launching]

Choices will have to be made one way or the other. A war on the Korean Peninsula would be terrible. However, a nuclear weapon detonating in Los Angeles would be terrible.

LAURA LYNCH: US General Mark Milley this past weekend laying out some stark choices in the hours after North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that appeared capable of reaching the West Coast of the United States. It was the second launch in under a month. US President Donald Trump says it's up to China to stop North Korea. China flatly rejects the suggestion. And so the increasingly worrying and complex politics of the Korean Peninsula are the focus of our first half hour today. After that—

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The great women like Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, all they asked for was equal opportunity for women to show that they could achieve at the same level as men had. First wave feminism did not bash men.

LL: Camille Paglia is to many feminists the bête noire of the movement. More than 40 years after she began writing about what she believes are the failings of feminism, she is unrepentant. On everything from campus sexual assault to the way women dress, to Hillary Clinton—Paglia says she's never succeeded at anything—she's nothing if not provocative. Earlier this year, Paglia released a new collection of her writings. We'll revisit a conversation I had with her then—a very spirited conversation. I'm Laura Lynch and this is the summer edition of The Current.

'There are not any good options': Rising tensions with North Korea leaves U.S. scrambling

Guests: Graham Allison, Bruce Klingner, Greg Scarlatoiu

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VOICE 1: Of course over the weekend, North Korea showcasing its own ICBM program—a missile that analysts believe puts within striking range US cities along the West Coast and even as far east as Chicago.

VOICE 2: President Trump says China is not doing enough to halt the weapons program of its ally, North Korea. He made the comments on Twitter after Pyongyang test fired its second intercontinental ballistic missile in a month.

VOICE 3: No matter how capable China is, China’s efforts will not yield practical results because it depends on the two principal parties. They hold the prime responsibility to keep things moving. Not China.

DONALD TRUMP: We’ll handle North Korea. We're going to be able to handle. It will be handled. We handle everything. Thank you very much.

LL: Some of the fallout after North Korea's latest and boldest missile launch last weekend. You heard the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations insist that the US must step up to contain the rising threat. And US President Donald Trump saying yesterday he'd do just that and handle the situation—a situation that continues to escalate. Just last night, a US defence official told CNN that the US military has detected highly unusual North Korean submarine activity, including a missile ejection test since the latest ICBM missile launched last month. So how can the world handle Kim Jong-un's rogue state? Is there anything left in the diplomatic tool kit that can curb North Korea's ambitions and walk the world back from the brink? We have two guests standing by now to share their thoughts. Graham Allison is the director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former US assistant secretary of defence for policy and plans. He's also the author of Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? And he's in Boston. Bruce Klingner is a senior research fellow for northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation's Asian Studies Center. In the mid-90s, he was the CIA's deputy division chief for Korea and he joins us from Washington, DC. Hello to you both.

BOTH VOICES: Good morning.

LL: Graham Allison, let's start with you. Why have sanctions so far been not very successful in curbing North Korea's nuclear ambitions?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, I think first and foremost because North Korea does not depend on anything external to North Korea to build its nuclear weapons program. So sanctions have been an attempt to impose costs on North Korea for what it's been doing. But I think the North Korean regime, under both the current Kim and under his father, has judged having nuclear weapons as a survival blanket is more important than any costs that can be imposed on it from sanctions. That’s the first reason. Secondly, the biggest relationship for North Korea is with China and China has been clear about two things. One, it's not prepared to collapse the North Korean regime because it thinks what will follow will be chaos and then probably the unification of the peninsula under South Korea. And secondly, that it's not prepared to have a unified Korea that's an American military ally. It thinks that's why it fought the first Korean War in 1950 and they think that matter is settled.

LL: So what does the US need to do differently then?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, I would say we've tried extremely—we've tried multiple alternatives. None of them have been successful. I was in the Clinton administration. In 1994, the defense department's view, including my own—I strongly supported it, Bill Perry was secretary of defence—was that we should attack North Korea. We should give them basically an ultimatum. Either you eliminate what was going to become their nuclear weapons material—that's on the one hand—or alternatively we would attack and destroy it. But we understood that ran the risk of North Korea retaliating against Seoul, though at the time they had a much more limited capability, and that could trigger the second Korean War. And we should remember in the first Korean War, 50,000 Americans died and several hundred thousand Chinese and many hundred thousand South Koreans. So that's a horrible, horrible choice between no nukes and potential of war. That didn't work.

LL: So what do you suggest doing now?

GRAHAM ALLISON: I would say there are not any good options. I think that your quote at the top of the program from Milley between terribles and horribles and unimaginables and catastrophics are the options that are available. I think my wish and hope would be that we could make sufficiently credible to both China and North Korea, that we would attack to prevent further tests of ICBMs and therefore North Korea's development of a reliable capability to attack San Francisco or Los Angeles or Vancouver, so they could have to stop or alternatively they would believe they would be attacked.

LL: Okay. I want to bring Bruce Klingner into this conversation. Do you agree with Graham Allison’s pretty pessimistic assessment of sanctions and options?

BRUCE KLINGNER: Well, I would disagree on sanctions. When people say sanctions don't work, the reality is its weak implementation of sanctions hasn't worked. There's a very widespread misperception that North Korea is the most heavily sanctioned, the most cut-off nation on earth as President Obama said. It's simply not true. The US, the EU and the UN did far stronger sanctions on Iran. That's why Iran came back to the negotiating table. Whether you like the nuclear deal or not, it was the pressure, along with the willingness to have the door open for diplomacy that led to that agreement. Last year was the first year that the US had cumulatively sanctioned as many North Korean entities as we had sanctioned those of Zimbabwe. So sanctions, we’ve been pulling the punches.

LL: But I would note that the sanctions haven't done that much in Zimbabwe.

BRUCE KLINGNER: Right. Yeah. Well, trying to say that the sanctions haven't worked is that we haven't fully implemented them. So the US continues to pull its punches even under President Trump. You know, we have not sanctioned Chinese entities that are violators of US law. A couple of weeks ago, the Trump administration sanctioned a single Chinese bank that was the first time in 12 years. We've imposed $12 billion in fines on European banks for money laundering for Iran. We've imposed zero dollars in fines on Chinese banks. So if you talk to people who work sanctions in the US government, they'll say for years I've had lists of Chinese and North Korean and other entities that are violating US law. We have the evidence for them. We could sanction them this afternoon. But we were prevented from doing so by senior levels of the government.

LL: That was one small bank. That bank I believe was sanctioned before, as you said, 12 years ago and then taken off the table. So does it need to be more than one small bank?

BRUCE KLINGNER: Exactly. It was actually two different banks. But what happened when we did that other bank called Banco Delta Asia 12 years ago, the US also had a series of private meetings throughout Asia, and that led as the undersecretary of treasury testified, to 24 entities including entire countries and the Bank of China defying the government of China by cutting off North Korea. So it's based on the fact that the vast majority of all international financial transactions in the world are denominated in dollars. That means they have to go through a US Treasury Department-regulated bank in the United States. That actually gives us far more leverage than people think. So if you send money from Paris to London, it actually goes through New York. So we can seize and freeze assets. We can impose fines as we did with those European banks and we can prevent an entity from accessing the US financial system and everyone in the world knows that that entity is a pariah. So it's a tool that we've underutilized.

LL: Now we did contact the Chinese embassy to ask it about China's position on North Korea and we received a statement. It reads in part: “China opposes North Korea's launching activities that violate the UN Security Council resolutions and run counter to the collective will of the international community. Fundamentally, the Korean Peninsula nuclear issue wasn't caused by China. So the key to its settlement today does not lie in China's hands. As a major neighbour, China has been working with the international community to seek a proper settlement of the peninsula nuclear issue through dialogue. Graham Allison, President Trump has been publicly pressuring China to do more to rein in the Kim regime. How effective will that be?

GRAHAM ALLISON: Well, I think unfortunately not likely to be effective. I think the Chinese have, as I say, looked at the situation and they think again, there's a choice between bad and worse options. War on the peninsula then was surely the worst option, but the collapse of North Korea is also an unacceptable option, given that the likelihood it brings a unified Korea that the American military align. So they have gone along with sanctions to the extent that they need to humour the US I think, but not particularly more than that. I agree with Bruce's earlier point that you could imagine a sanction regime—if the Chinese were prepared to engage in it—that basically cuts off all dealings with North Korea including the supply of oil to North Korea, 90 per cent of which comes from China. But the Chinese are not prepared to do that. And there's nothing that we're able to do, I think, to the Chinese to persuade them to do that because the reason why we deal with the Chinese gingerly is that while we can cause harm to them economically, they can cause harm to us. Now whether President Trump will decide to work that problem, take greater risks down that path, we will see. But so far, I see no evidence of it.

LL: Bruce Klingner, What about the option of trying to negotiate? Why wouldn't President Trump send in his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to listen to see if the North Koreans are ready to talk?

BRUCE KLINGNER: Well, it's really a case of “been there, done that, it hasn't worked.” North Korea signed four international agreements promising never to build nuclear weapons. Those all failed. They then agreed to four subsequent accords where they promised to give up the weapons they promised never to build in the first place. Those all failed. We've had two party, three party, four party, six party talks. They all failed. And North Korea from Kim Jong-un, down every senior component of the North Korean government has said we will never ever, ever negotiate away our nuclear weapons. I met with North Korean officials last month in Europe and they said denuclearization is off the table. They will not negotiate away their nuclear weapons. There's nothing the US or South Korea can offer. We're prepared to talk about a peace treaty or fight.

LL: Then what do you think is going to happen? How is this going to end?

BRUCE KLINGNER: I think we are going to continue on this path. With regards to China, we can influence the Chinese banks and businesses away from engaging with North Korea. That would further the pressure on North Korea. Regardless of whether the Chinese government goes along with it or not, the US can use its own laws to preclude those entities from accessing the US financial system. It worked in 2005 and six before we removed the pressure. But again when I talked with the North Korean officials, I said it sounds like we're two players in a poker game. Neither of us wants a re-deal. Neither one of us wants new cards. We both think we have the stronger hand and we're just prepared to play out that hand. And the North Korean official said yeah, that's about it.

LL: Graham Allison?

GRAHAM ALLISON: I think that’s a good analogy. I've written about this as a Cuban Missile Crisis in slow motion. So if we go back to 1962, over 13 days we came to a crossroad, at which Kennedy had to choose between attacking the missiles in Cuba that would have become nuclear tipped missiles capable of attacking the US on the one hand, or on the other hand acquiescing in the Soviet Union having a nuclear weapons base in Cuba. Only at the last minute when he saw a look, the eye of that terrible choice, did he become extremely inventive. So my hope is over the next month—not too long—but it still, speeding up, we're going to notice that we're coming to such a crossroad. If we can't make credible the threat that we will attack, I think North Korea will continue doing exactly what it's doing. And whether as we think about those two terrible options, people will be as inventive as Kennedy turned out to be in the missile crisis—that would be the hope.

LL: I have a feeling we'll be talking to both of you again. But for now, I thank you very much.

GRAHAM ALLISON: Thank you so much.

BRUCE KLINGNER: Thank you.

LL: Graham Allison is the director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and a former US assistant secretary of defence for policy and plans. He was in Boston. And Bruce Klingner is the senior research fellow for northeast Asia at the Heritage Foundation. He was in Washington, DC. Of course when we speak of North Korea in terms of diplomacy and sanctions, it can all seem a little abstract. But these decisions have very real consequences for the more than 25 million people who live in North Korea and South Korea today. Greg Scarlatoiu is executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a non-profit group based in Washington. He is in Seoul, South Korea. Hello.

GREG SCARLATOIU: Laura, a very good morning to you.

LL: You're in the Korean Peninsula right now. How concerned are people there about this escalating tension?

GREG SCARLATOIU: The people of South Korea live in a democratic prosperous country, a truly economic powerhouse. For almost seven decades they have been living under this permanent and overwhelming threat of the sheer mass and proximity of the North Korean military. There are some new capabilities, asymmetric capabilities that have been added to the North Korean arsenal. Of course this includes ICBMs, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons—we are aware of those—biological weapons. This is an overwhelming threat, but here in South Korea, life goes on. Again, this is a free prosperous country. People live their lives facing tough competition at home and great challenges. Of course they're concerned about these new challenges posed by North Korea. But again, the feeling that we all get here in Seoul and in South Korea is that life goes on.

LL: And in North Korea, what is the humanitarian situation on the ground there like right now?

GREG SCARLATOIU: In the mid to late 1990s, North Korea experienced a great famine. Anywhere between 600,000 and three million people died. There is no famine in North Korea right now, no ongoing humanitarian emergency. However, many North Koreans continue to be food insecure. Many North Koreans continue to be economically insecure. About one third of North Korea's children are malnourished while the Kim regime is investing heavily in its nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as tools it regards necessary in order to ensure its own survival.

LL: You just heard the previous guests debating the efficacy of sanctions. How do you think existing sanctions have affected North Korean society?

GREG SCARLATOIU: I agree with Bruce Klingner’s view on the sanctions. First and foremost, the sanctions need more time to be tested. Better compliance with implementation can be ensured that the sanctions regime rooted in the UN Security Council resolutions is not meant to hurt the people of North Korea, the ordinary people of North Korea. This sanctions regime aims to prevent the development and proliferation of North Korean ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons. Unfortunately the sanctions regime had absolutely nothing to do with North Korea's egregious human rights violations, although in February 2014, a UN commission of inquiry submitted a report to the human rights council in Geneva—a report that found that crimes against humanity are committed in North Korea. Now we do have our own US-North Korea policy and sanctions enforcement act and human rights violations in particular crimes against humanity are included in the type of behaviour that is subjected to the sanctions regime. Of course the sanctions regime also aims to punish the North Korean elites in charge of the development and proliferation of ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons by severing their access to luxury goods coming from the outside world.

LL: Is that working?

GREG SCARLATOIU: Due to Chinese lack of compliance, that is not really working. Also the Russian Federation has reverted to the use of rubles in Russia-North Korea trade. The North Korean elites can simply purchase their luxury goods at Chinese and Russian department stores. China still considers that North Korea presents great strategic utility. China is interested in maintaining stability on its borders. China does not want to see any massive inflows of refugees. China surely understands that this is a criminal regime, and yet it regards the Kim Jong regime as a political arrangement that maintains stability on its borders while maintaining the northern half of the Korean peninsula within its sphere of influence. China does not have the capability to transform North Korea perhaps, but China clearly has the capability to shut down North Korea. All they would have to do would be to shut down the bridge between the Chinese city of Dandong and the North Korean city of Sinuiju. That's where most border traffic—

LL: Right. We're going to have to end it there although there is much more to ask you about. Thank you very much.

GREG SCARLATOIU: The pleasure is mine, Laura.

LL: Greg Scarlatoiu is the executive director of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. We reached him in Seoul, South Korea. The CBC News is next. Then the feminist who often finds herself out of favour with other feminists including Madonna—my interview with the ever-provocative Camille Paglia. That's after the break. I'm Laura Lynch and you are listening to the summer edition of The Current.

[Music: Sting]

ENCORE | Modern feminism needs to 'stop blaming men,' says Camille Paglia

Guest: Camille Paglia

LL: Hello, I’m Laura Lynch and you’re listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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LL: Up next, there’s outspoken and then there’s my next guest.

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Camille Paglia—by title, professor of humanities at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. By growing reputation, the scourge of American feminism. By self-assessment, America's leading female intellectual. She considers herself a passionate feminist, a champion of opportunity, individuality and choice, but contends that modern feminism has fast descended into dogma, intolerance and male bashing.

LL: That was a typical televised introduction to Camille Paglia from 25 years ago back in the early 1990s and everything that was true of her then is true of her still today. The pugnacious public intellectual has been a disruptor for decades in academia and the arts and especially amongst feminists. Her outspoken views on hot button topics from date rape to free speech on campus have riled her critics including many fellow feminists. She's even been called out by none other than Madonna, who name checked Camille Paglia while receiving Billboard’s Woman of the Year award in 2016.

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I remember wishing that I had a female peer that I could look to for support. Camille Paglia, the famous feminist writer said that I set women back by objectifying myself sexually. Oh, I thought. So if you're a feminist, you don't have sexuality. You deny it. So I said, [expletive] it. I'm a different kind of feminist. I'm a bad feminist.

[Sound: Crowd cheering and applauding]

LL: Well, earlier this season as part of The Current’s project, The Disruptors, Camille Paglia joined me to offer a rejoinder. Her latest book is titled Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism. And the university professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia joined me in our Toronto studio in April.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: It's wonderful to be here.

LL: Watching you listen to the tape going by, I saw a smile with that first bit of tape and a bit of a throwing up your hands in frustration with the second one. Back in 1990, you actually called Madonna the future of feminism—

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Exactly.

LL: For her upfront sexuality. She seems to say the opposite in that speech. What did you think when you heard that?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, poor Madonna. She's rather confused. She's mixed me up with Gloria Steinem and the other anti-porn feminists. Madonna foregrounded pornography and glamour and all kinds of things that I celebrated. And this idea that there was no female peer who would work with her, she turned down one invitation after another to collaborate with me. Esquire magazine wanted me to interview her for a cover story. She declined. Penthouse magazine wanted to feature us together. She declined. Listen, Madonna is a genius. The retrospective of her life is seen. She changed the world so profoundly that people think she's completely unnecessary right now.

LL: You say she mixed you up with other feminists.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes.

LL: So I'm wondering how much of a gap do you see between your actual arguments and the way your arguments are perceived by the public?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: You know obviously I have a huge fan base and also a huge army of detractors. But the reason that I've always been out of sync with current feminism is because my feminism began before second wave feminism was born with Betty Friedan's co-founding of NOW, National Organization for Women in 1966. In my new book, I quote the letter to the editor that I wrote to Newsweek magazine when I was 16—1963—where I protest the exclusion of women from the American space program. First wave feminism after women gained the right to vote did not bash men. The great women like Amelia Earhart and Katharine Hepburn and so many women of the 1920s and ‘30s, all they asked for was equal opportunity for women to show that they could achieve at the same level as men had. I am on a crusade to get the male bashing out of feminism. It's absolutely unnecessary. At this point it’s turned into a neurosis.

LL: At this point you've been saying much the same thing for how many years now? What, 40 years?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, I burst on the scene with my first book Sexual Personae in 1990. But that book had been rejected. It took forever to get into print. And then the feminist establishment in the United States had its usual reflex attitude which was someone disagrees with us, trash her. Destroy her. They could not destroy me. And they found that they couldn't disrupt me in person because I'm a comedian. I do improv like Joan Rivers. So anything anyone threw at me, I could throw back.

LL: Okay. So let's deal with some labels here. You've been called the anti-feminist feminist. What do you think of that?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes. Well, this is true that I'm a feminist who disagrees with current feminist ideology. I am a reformer within feminism. Too many independent minded women have turned their backs on feminism because there was no place for them within the culture. I had quarrels, almost fisticuffs with early feminists. From the late 1960s, you know into the early 1970s, I was literally drummed out of the women's movement because you know I refuse to bash men. I was pro-sex. For example, the Bond girls of the James Bond movies, I loved them. Meanwhile the other feminists were occupying the offices.

LL: Are you a feminist?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Absolutely. The current definition of feminism is far too limited. I subscribe to first wave feminism. I'm an equal opportunity feminist by which I mean that all barriers to women's advance in the professional realm and political realm must be removed. However, I also say that the private realm is far too complex spiritually and psychologically for regulation from government. So I call for a very strict line between the public and private realms.

LL: That's your libertarian philosophy working into things.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes.

LL: Now the question I think for a lot of people when you say that is if there are obstacles that exist for women and have existed for many, many decades, how do you remove them without legislating them?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, in my philosophy I call street-smart Amazon feminism by which I mean that every woman is responsible for what she will tolerate in every situation including professional. For example, I support sexual harassment guidelines and indeed I pioneered that at my own university. However, I disagree with a hostile workplace category that has to do with someone telling an off-colour joke merely because someone feels uncomfortable is not enough to call in the power of the state. Now my family is an Italian immigrant family. All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy. Whatever job my family had, despite the fact that they had no power in the workplace, they would not tolerate any kind of undignified or sexualized comment on themselves. They risked their jobs by saying firmly it from the start that is not acceptable. Now what I'm criticizing in current feminism is a kind of bourgeois entitlement. There's an upper middle class girly thing. Young women are demanding a continuation of the protected environment of their bourgeois living room on a college campus and the workplace. I think it's profoundly infantilizing. Right now we have an entire generation of young people, both male and female, who are disabled from even recognizing the dangers of real life.

LL: I wanted to challenge a couple of these points though because when it comes to the workplace, you and I both know that younger people—this generation who are moving into the workplace now—live in precarious times. We call about precarious employment where jobs aren't secure and because of that, younger women may feel intimidated by the idea of standing up to the bad remarks or the bad behaviours. Don't they deserve to have some kind of avenue to go to get help?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Not from above. Not paternalistic rules which say that whatever problems you're having, there'll be mommy and daddy afterward to protect you. No.

LL: So what do they do?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: They should model their persona on me and on feminism of the 1960s, which is that you are responsible for how people treat you. If you just smile and comply and say oh, I'm afraid of getting fired. Your dignity as a human person is more important than job success.

LL: So take a stand and lose your job.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: You're not going to lose your job. You'll be respected more. The men will recognize the strength in you. Stand up for yourself. Be responsible.

LL: Let me raise another point. How does that street smart feminism tackles systemic problems like pay inequity?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, if there are cases where a woman is being paid less for the same job that a man does, that is illegal and it has been illegal in the United States since John F. Kennedy passed that legislation.

LL: So you support that legislation.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Absolutely. However, I do not accept what has happened now, which people are looking at charts of the earnings of women and the earnings of men and demanding pay equity without looking at the kinds of jobs that women are choosing. Many women choose safe clean jobs in offices doing clerical work that pays less for whatever reason, okay. For their sense of personal comfort and safety or the fact that it's more adaptable and flexible for their own family and childcare needs. It’s the men who are doing some of the most dangerous but also high-paying work that's out there. The figures are something like 92, 94 per cent of the fatalities on jobs are male. You never hear about that. What I'm saying in my work is that the cause of their unhappiness is not necessarily men or the career system but rather a brand new world that they now inhabit where they are working side by side with men. This is an experiment. Okay? It's never happened in human history. Now I, coming from an Italian immigrant family, experienced the end of the agrarian era in this whole town of Italians that emigrated to work in a shoe factory in upstate New York. The solidarity of women was extremely sustaining multi generations of women together. Women are now lonely. This is not the life that they had for tens of thousands of years before. Stop blaming men. Women now have the ability to support themselves thanks to this new post-industrial capitalist system. We don't have to depend on men any longer for income. At the same time, people are lonely and there's a sense of dislocation.

LL: But again, I go back to this idea of how do you remove the obstacles. We know that there are very few women occupying seats in the boardrooms of the United States and Canada and other countries. How do you accomplish that? Is it just something that's going to take care of itself over the years?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I think that women need to present themselves with a persona of strength and reliability. I think that the way women dress is ultimately also undermining the seriousness with which men take them.

LL: What? Really?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes. If I see a picture of men, who every inch of their body is covered in a professional situation, you know I love sexy clothing. But I'm saying that women really need to look at themselves and to realize when you are dressing with short skirts, bare legs and stiletto heels in a professional workplace, you are saying that your sexuality is part of your power and the blindness—

LL: That sounds so antiquated to me.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: No, no. The blindness that professional women have to the sexual fantasies that they arouse—as a lesbian, okay, I’m telling you. This is my analysis. Okay. If I can see the sexuality, the men are seeing it 10 times more. I'm not saying stop wearing that sexualizing clothing. I'm saying you cannot just offer yourself as an ornament.

LL: Is that why Hillary Clinton wore pantsuits through the campaign?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: The fashion statements of Hillary Clinton have been given to her by others. Alright. So let's not get into that. She's never been a sexual being. Hillary has always had a persona problem.

LL: While we're on Hillary Clinton, you labelled her a disaster during the 2016 election. Why?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, I've been writing on Hillary Clinton for like 25 years. Hillary is not an ideal candidate for the first woman president. I was pounding the drum about the first woman president issue from the mid-1990s on. I always said that Senator Dianne Feinstein of California was the ideal model. She has true gravitas, true political experience, knows all about military intelligence issues and so on. Hillary Clinton has written her husband's coattails her entire life. She has had a whole series of jobs—

LL: How can you say that when she was a senator in her own standing?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: She did not get that position without her attachment to her husband.

LL: And secretary of state?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I am a native of the state of New York. It's an outrage. This woman, she had never lived in New York. She's never accomplished a thing.

LL: She was a secretary of state.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: She was a terrible—

LL: She won the popular vote in the election.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: She was a terrible secretary of state who destabilized North Africa and caused that refugee influx into Italy. Benghazi was a disaster. The woman has not one single accomplishment on her record.

LL: She did have some success. She did win the popular vote.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Concentrated in two large areas—metropolitan New York and Los Angeles. Most people were scared to death about Trump.

LL: But you didn't support Trump.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: No. No, I did not.

LL: So do you see his administration in its first 100 days as a better result for women?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: You know I don't judge everything that happens in human existence by the standard of women and feminism. I think that is a kind of parochialism and that kind of microscopic view of the totality of human life and of current political affairs.

LL: So you don't want to answer that question?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I'm sorry.

LL: Has the Donald Trump administration been better for women?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: This is not my issue. I voted for Jill Stein. I'm a supporter of Bernie Sanders. I voted for Jill Stein because part of my agenda would be to destroy the present corrupt structure of the Democratic Party.

LL: Okay. We could go on about this, but there's so many other things to talk to you about. I want to move on now to date rape, sexual assault. You've generated a lot of controversy over the years on your on your views on that. Can you summarize your argument?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Yes. Well, first of all I want to say that I have been teaching as a classroom professor for 46 years. So I am very close to women undergraduates. I see them every day and the people who disagree with me rarely have that kind of in-person experience with women undergraduates. My philosophy is that of the women of the sexual revolution. I arrived in college in 1964. We women were required to sign in at night at 11 o'clock. The male undergraduates could run free the whole night. It was my generation that revolted against that. We demanded the freedom that men had. The colleges responded: The world is dangerous. You could be attacked. You could be injured. You could be raped. So my generation of the sexual revolution said give us the freedom to risk rape. Each woman now must realize the extent of this great gift of freedom that she has. She must negotiate her sexual identity, her sexual choices at every moment of every day.

LL: Let's get to words here because for a lot of people, a lot of feminists, words matter. What’s your argument against no means no and yes means yes?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: The sentence “no means no”, it's nonsense. It's absolute nonsense. It does not conform to anything in sexual behaviour. Sex is something that is happening in your body. Words do not correspond. The verbal realm of the brain does not correspond to what's going on in the body. Men know when they're sexually aroused because they have an erection. Okay? Women do not know often that they are giving signals of sexual interest or readiness. I, as a lesbian—

LL: You’re making women sound quite stupid.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I, as a lesbian have hit this wall so many times in my life. I've seen it with my own eyes. Okay. Women are maddening. Because I have this kind of crossed sexual experience, I know that what I'm saying is true.

LL: But shouldn't the onus be on men not to sexually assault women?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: We're not talking about sexual assault. Often in case of undergraduates, we’re talking about both individuals are drunk. The men are looking for sexual experience. The women aren't sure what they want. Sometimes they don't really want to have sex. Sometimes they want a boyfriend. But the confusion that's going on, undergraduates drinking and flirting and so on—

LL: But there are cases though. There was a reason one in California where a woman was unconscious and sexually assaulted.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, obviously this is an atrocity. Obviously we're not talking about that. We're not talking about the stupidity—an evil man having sex with an unconscious woman. We're talking about the complex area of a young woman arriving at a fraternity party. Okay. And in their own pleasant way of talking with the young man, both are drunk. The man thinking okay, that she is sexually interested when she's just merely flirting. Now what I said from the start—and I maintain I'm correct—a girl who goes to a fraternity party and is asked by a young man would you like to go to my room. I still maintain to this day that a woman who says yes is signaling she is ready for sex. I'm sorry. I follow the system of gay men. For thousands of years, gay men have gone out into the streets, into the shadows and risked being beaten up and killed in the interest of sexual adventure. You don't see gay men complaining, complaining, complaining about this and that and how they were abused and so on. But I know perfectly well from my own friends how often the dangers of your encounters with a potential psychotic is there.

LL: But you’ve already stated clearly that you support guidelines in universities on sexual harassment. What do you see as the role of universities when it comes to dealing with sexual assault?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Okay. What I'm saying is that the universities have the right and indeed obligation to regulate the faculty's interactions with the students. However, I am calling very radically for all universities to stay completely out of supervision of student life. Universities have no right to be observing even what students say to each other, what students do with each other. If a crime is committed, that crime must be immediately reported to the police and the universities must stand back. No more grievance committees. No more this nanny state intrusion. Universities have become simply nursery schools and I said that in 1992—the nursery school campus. I was the first probably to predict what has come to pass: the absolute end of any kind of intellectual life and universities probably everywhere in North America because of this incredible administrator bureaucratic intrusion, fascist intrusion into student life. Leave the students alone. Get out completely.

LL: What should women be fighting for today?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, I think that women must decide what they want. And I think too few young women have been given the opportunity to even think about these matters because of a combination of feminist attitudes and university attitudes and so on, the denial of sexual difference. I believe there are biological differences and at the same time, my work is sexual personae. It's about sexual mass. It’s about the acculturation of role playing by men and women over time. But I did the research, massive research into the history of anthropology and science and so on, and world history, world cultures. There are biological differences. There are hormonal differences. It is absolutely atrocious that we have gender studies, women's studies programs and courses being taught without any reference whatever to biology. I'm not saying that you need to accept any kind of biological explanation but the ignorance about biology is outrageous. Most men have anywhere from eight to 10 times the level of testosterone that women have in their own bodies. You don't think that causes some difference in the brain and instincts and in the way we approach the world? So hormones are back when it comes to the transgender lobby, but not in regard to male and female sex differences?

LL: You've been unyielding in all of these years. I don't think you've budged even—to use the metric system—a centimetre on your views. Am I right?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I'm trying to think of where there's any point where—I think perhaps the only one point I might regret is I was a little bit mean to Naomi Wolf. Okay. And I called her Little Miss Pravda and so on. I used my Joan Rivers tongue on her and so on. But aside from that, no because you have to realize that my first book was published when I was 43 years old and I had been at this point teaching and writing and researching for all those decades. So by the time I burst on the scene, my system was fairly well coherent.

LL: But my point is that in all of these years, the goalposts haven't shifted too much in your direction from what I can see, from the arguments you've been making all these years. And in fact, you lament that things are coming back around again. So what's your relevance? What is the relevance of your arguments in today’s world?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, I'm a leader of the dissident wing of feminism and I see you know many young people who want a more free speech-centered kind of philosophy. I mean I get mail all the time. I hear from people in England and in Germany and Italy, everywhere. What's happened is actually an institutional kind of a fossilization, that is institutions have fossilized a certain kind of feminist rhetoric from the early 1970s. And what's happened is that freethinking feminists or just freethinking scholars of any kind have been driven out of the colleges and universities. I mean I've gotten letters from them for decades: I can't take it anymore. There's no future for me in academia. So what we have are these like to me, these cells of reaction which are the colleges and the universities and I might point out the mainstream media. The major media—probably some of my bitterest enemies have been upper middle class women journalists in London, in Toronto, in New York, certainly in Washington, et cetera. They are absolutely with their claws into this ideology. And I think it's because of some bitterness that they have through personal experiences with men. I do feel that I'm going to win in the long run. Alright. Because my system is so well worked out in terms of its research from the Stone Age on and that I will be seen to have been a prophet of my time.

LL: Well, then let's end by going sort of back to where we started and that was with Madonna. In 1990, you did describe her as the future of feminism. Who represents feminism's new future?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Well, I think it's the young people will determine what feminism will be.

LL: Do you see anyone out there?

CAMILLE PAGLIA: I don't see any figures of the dimension of let's say, Germaine Greer. Germaine Greer is the woman I admire most in the world, a person I admire most in the world. She's a completely independent thinker. People don't even recognize what an independent thinker is anymore. Why don't you believe like everyone else? It's like the hive. I think people are looking for a religion. That's what I keep on saying. Okay? I'm an atheist but people need a religion. They need a creed. And so when they got rid of Judeo-Christianity, they've locked on to feminist ideology. That's what makes it very difficult to argue with anyone because they're so locked into the commandments that they absorbed.

LL: Camille Paglia, thank you very much.

CAMILLE PAGLIA: Thank you.

LL: Camille Paglia is the author of most recently Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism and she joined me this past April in Toronto. That is our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for a new episode of the summer series On Drugs. This week, Addicted City—Vancouver’s complicated relationship with drugs told through the voices of people living with addiction. And remember you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It’s free from the App Store or Google Play. I am Laura Lynch. Thank you for listening to the summer edition of The Current.

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August 1, 2017 full episode transcript

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