Camille Paglia | Feminism: What Women Lost

Overview

Camille Paglia argues that modern feminism—often framed as liberating—has coincided with widespread unhappiness among “upper-middle class career women,” and that feminism partly misdiagnoses the causes of that dissatisfaction.

Key Claims

Women’s unhappiness isn’t primarily “men’s fault”

Paglia says feminists’ common stance—blaming men for women’s unhappiness—is wrong. She argues that the unhappiness stems from huge systemic changes, including:

• Women’s economic independence
• The breakdown of the older arrangement in which women and men largely had separate social worlds

She describes workplace “experiments” (men and women working side by side in ways that historically were uncommon) as producing tensions that can’t be solved simply by suppressing men.

What women “lost” was female solidarity and social belonging

Paglia claims the central loss was the old community structure in which women—multi-generational, including older women and children—formed a “tribal” network and shared daily life together (especially in private/agricultural settings).

She connects this to her own childhood in Italian-American immigrant communities, recalling how women worked together, sang, and maintained close social ties. She then interprets modern events and literature through that lens:

• She reads recent women’s marches as women re-experiencing the lost feeling—energizing and emotionally cathartic, not primarily tied to party politics or a single anti-Trump agenda.
• Using an analogy from the Odyssey, she portrays what happens when women’s voices and community are absent: loneliness, isolation, and dislocation.

Feminism contributes to cultural “identity” pressures

Paglia contrasts older communal life—where identity was effectively given—with today’s “quest for identity,” which she says places psychological burdens on young people.

She also points to social media as worsening cultural and cognitive decline, contributing to:

• Less reasoning/reading/writing
• Greater mental and cultural “entropy”

Critiques of Academic and Cultural Trends

Restoring biology in gender studies

Paglia strongly criticizes gender studies for excluding biology and hormones. She argues that post-structuralist approaches dominate academia, which she rejects as:

• Jargon-heavy
• Politically hollow
• Offering ideology without grounding in real biological and historical study

Broader critique of academia and university administrators

She portrays universities as increasingly controlled by an “administrative master class”, comparing the current situation to “Stalinism.”

According to Paglia:

• Campus “leftists” do not meaningfully resist bureaucratic trends
• Faculty have been marginalized
• Universities should reduce administrators dramatically, including cutting administrators’ salaries

Additional Policy Critique: The U.S. Drinking Age

Paglia also criticizes the U.S. law restricting alcohol purchase to those 21+, arguing it:

• Pushes young people toward dangerous club drugs when they can’t drink responsibly in adult social settings
• Discourages moderation in safer contexts such as bars and mature social environments

Historical/Personal Framework

Paglia bases her analysis on what she describes as lived exposure to major historical transitions—agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial—through her family’s immigrant roots and her community in upstate New York.

She further depicts:

• Rural/country women as having physical and mental power
• Examples of women confronting threats or directing household labor
• Earlier women’s voting rights in western U.S. territories because women’s social status was more clearly seen as equal, contrasted with older, Eastern, university-heavy states that resisted until the 19th Amendment

Presenters/Contributors

• Camille Paglia