Academic Conferences

“The conferences are oppressive bourgeois forms that enforce a style of affected patter and smarmy whimsy in the speaker and polite chuckles and iron-butt torpor in the audience. Success at the conferences requires a certain kind of physically inert personality, superficially cordial but emotionally dissociated. It’s the genteel high Protestant style of the country clubs and corporate boardrooms, with their financial reports and marketing presentations.” —Camille Paglia

Psychological Issues that Demand Psychological Responses?

“I identify strongly with the transgendered. Throughout my childhood and adolescence, I felt as if I were the wrong sex. If the current trend had been operative when I was in high school or college, I would certainly have been experimenting with male hormones. But I think that would have been a terrible mistake. Instead of modifying my body to conform to my male spirit, I put all my bottled-up energy into ambition and creativity. I worry that too many young lesbians believe that infusions of male hormones will remedy their sense of isolation and alienation. But perhaps those are psychological issues that demand psychological responses – new tracks of spiritual self-development and achievement. Many transgendered individuals do ‘pass’ in general society, but many others, after their surgical modifications, may be confining themselves forever to the margins, to the supportive burrow of a ghettoed world from which they fear to stray.” —Camille Paglia