Though I will say that if a man urinates while drinking ice cold water it’s more transcendant than usual.
“There’s a difference between peeing in the pool, and peeing INTO the pool.”
- Demetri Martin
In response to the OP looking for impressions of Paglia…
I first saw her on 60 Minutes and was intrigued. Later, I read Sexual Personae and became a fan. I’d had some women in my life who felt I was sexist because I enjoyed looking at naked female bodies and so on. So I really appreciated Paglia’s take on feminism.
I did feel she was/is a bit extreme (haven’t read anything by her in recent years) but she did lead me to Christina Hoff Sommers and her excellent book, Who Stole Feminism? Brilliant, and one of the few books I own that I used a magic marker to highlight passages, and sticky notes to access the pages. Another great book is The War On Boys.
Sometimes I think the purpose of people like Camille Paglia on one side and Andrea Dworkin on the other is to stretch an argument to its extreme. Then the rest of us snip off the ends, so to speak, and find the more moderate stance.
It’s been more than a decade since I read that book, but here’s my WAG: she may be talking about how men feel, or our society feels, that men pee actively, directing the flow in a hands-on way, while women pee passively, using our hands only to clean up afterward. Men and/or society may feel that this reflects some deeper truth about the nature of masculinity. Feminists may feel it necessary to point out that men/society hold this opinion, either to explain some aspect of male psychology or to bemoan some aspect of male standard operating procedure.
A favorite pastime of a particular type of academic feminist, as illustrated in rowrrbazzle’s cites, is looking for male/female oppression and difference in EVERYTHING. A cigar is *never *just a cigar. Whether in that passage Paglia is deriding that school of thought or contributing to it, I don’t remember.
indian, could you give us some more context, the sentences just before that? Or maybe I can find it on Google books…
There is no greater joy than pissing OFF OF majestic places.
Aha. She wrote a *Salon *editorial about Larry Craig et al and the phenomenon of anonymous gay male sex in public toilets, noting that women tend not to find public toilets sexy, and expresses ambivalence over whether we ought to let men get away with it.
She goes on to quote herself in the passage **indian **asks about. So I’d say she’s explaining a vexing aspect of male psychology.
But it takes real skill to piss off majestic places.
Didn’t she get the “arc of transcendence,” idea from Tim Allen? I seem to remember her crediting it to him in an interview. Maybe a Playboy interview in the 1990’s.
Today I was walking my dog and we came to a prime marking spot. There, in a row nestled up along the street, were:
A garbage bin
A fire hydrant
A newly turned flower bed with beautiful red tulips
A cinder block
A stump from a sapling
Guess which one my dog lifted his leg on…did me proud, he did, sniff
I grew up in canyon country in Northern New Mexico. The statement “There is no greater joy than pissing in majestic places.” was made by my friend when we pissing off of a high cliff into the canyon.
It’s better to be pissed off than pissed on.
I don’t think we taste very good, although perhaps if you basted us and marinated us long enough…preferably not in piss…
I do hope you did not mean to suggest or imply that Camille Paglia is a feminist or a feminist theorist. Dick Cheney could proclaim himself an environmentalist but it would not make him one.
So there were these two dudes, see? Who were walking across the Golden Gate Bridge, when both had to take a leak real bad, so they whupped 'em out and hung 'em over the side.
“Man, that water’s cold!”
“Yeah. She deep, too.”
I think that sometimes the accusation that a person is out of touch and living in an ivory tower is very true.
Paglia is my favorite living author; no author has more changed how I think than she has.
Honey, does it feel like rain to you?
Diane Winston writes,
Men seek accomplishment and validation in the external world, which they succeed in doing by conquering it, imposing themselves on it, as an act of will.