A Crisis of Masculinity?
April 23, 2007 on 8:46 am | In Main |
Update: I take issue with my colleague Marshall Miles, who had high praise yesterday for this piece in The Huffington Post. Ridley freely admits he knows little about Smerconish (it shows BTW) but that the bald guy is simply “more of the same.” Why? Because his skin is the same color as Imus’s? Isn’t that a racist assumption? Maybe Ridley would have been happy with Michelle Malkin! What nonsense …
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Interesting follow-up on the VT shootings. Legendary feminist author Camille Paglia was interviewed this morning by Michael Smerconish, whose Philadelphia-based talk radio show is being simulcast this week on MSNBC in the studio and time slot formerly occupied by Don Imus. Yes, old habits die slowly …
Smerconish asked her about something she was quoted as saying in The Sunday Times of London. She blamed Cho’s murderous rampage at least partly on a “crisis in masculinity.” Another link here quotes Paglia essentially saying the same thing. Here’s a sample:
“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.â€
This relates a little to a post I made earlier this month on a talk by Evan Dobelle at the Salisbury Forum. College is not for everyone and Paglia takes it one step farther, arguing that even high school is not for everyone — especially those males for whom the standard classroom is “a prison.” I think she’s on to something, although I need more time to digest her specific thoughts on the VT rampage.
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isn’t this why schools have a Vocational Tech option? so that they can go and get some hand on activities in their chosen vocation.. and be with likeminded individuals instead of being mixed in with all the high school cliques?
It’s may not have been Cho’s option… but it’s as close as I can think to her assumption that thinking “high school is not for everyone”….. the one thing they teach you, that without a high school diploma, you wont go far. but with that HS diploma and 3 years experience in Auto Mechanics at Vo-Tech… you may have something.
Comment by fred — April 23, 2007 #
Fred,
Correct. I think part of Paglia’s point is that there probably are a lot of boys/men who would have been better suited to the vo-tech option but because of social pressures to have a white-collar career, they were steered away from working with their hands — hence the frustration and the “crisis.”
Comment by Terry — April 23, 2007 #