Camille Paglia: Sex scandals exposed Hollywood as false ‘bastion of enlightened liberalism’

Feminist icon Camille Paglia says that Hollywood’s recent sex scandals will force the industry to make tough philosophical choices after being exposed as a false “bastion of enlightened liberalism.”

The author of “Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism” predicts “endless sexual miscommunication and bitter rancor” in the years ahead as the entertainment industry deals with the #MeToo movement. Ms. Paglia suggests in an op-ed for The Hollywood Reporter that insiders look to the past — particularly films from Hollywood’s golden age of the 1930s and 40s — for a blueprint on how to move forward.

“No profession has been more shockingly exposed and damaged [by the #MeToo movement] than the entertainment industry, which has posed for so long as a bastion of enlightened liberalism,” the professor wrote for THR on Tuesday. “Despite years of pious lip service to feminism at award shows, the fabled ’casting couch’ of studio-era Hollywood clearly remains stubbornly in place.”

Ms. Paglia recommends the following for Hollywood after the fall of producer Harvey Weinstein, among others:

• Do not treat women as more “vulnerable, virtuous or credible than men.”
• Do not give women “special protections.”
• Encourage women to speak up about abuse immediately and embrace “principles of due process and the presumption of innocence.”
• Reject “postmodernist rhetoric of academe, which asserts that gender is a social construct and that biological sex differences don’t exist or don’t matter.”

“Speaking from my lifelong transgender perspective, I find such claims absurd,” Ms. Paglia wrote. “That most men and women on the planet experience and process sexuality differently, in both mind and body, is blatantly obvious to any sensible person. […] For all its idealistic good intentions, today’s #MeToo movement, with its indiscriminate catalog of victims, is taking us back to the Victorian archetypes of early silent film, where mustache-twirling villains tied damsels in distress to railroad tracks.”

The author concluded by warning of cultural strife caused by a generation of kids “locked to their miniaturized cellphones” and increasingly “unable to read real-life facial expressions and body language.”