those ideas without fear of punishment, and you create a situation that transforms a nation in 1933 from one in which 55% of the germans had never voted for hitler to one in 1938 and '39 is ready to do to the jews everything that hitler wants it to do. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> so tonight we are delighted to have camille paglia here, and i will do a more formal introduction than usual, but bear with that, because instead of my usual ramble. camille is the university professor of humanities and university studies in philadelphia where she has taught since 1984. she received her b.a. from the state university of new york at binghamton in 1968 and her masters in philosophy and ph.d. degrees from yale university in 1971 and 1974

respectively. her prior books are sexual persona, art and decadence which came out in 1990, sex, art and american culture, vamps and tramps, new essays which came out in 1994, the birds, a study of alfred hitchcock, published in 1998, blake -- [inaudible] camille paglia reads 43 of the world's best poems and glittering images: a journey through art from egypt to "star wars." she is here this evening with her seventh book, "free women, free men: sex, gender, feminism," a selection of her most notable articles and lectures on these subjects. her third general essay collection will be out a year from this fall from pantheon, the publisher that's been publishing her work. professor paglia was co-founding

contributor and columnist for salon.com. she's written numerous articles on literature, poplar culture, religion and politics for publications around the world. it's a pleasure to -- thank you all for being here tonight, and now please join in welcoming back to seattle camille paglia. [applause] >> well, hello. i don't know which mic to use first here. what a pleasure to be back in this beautiful city. the first time i came for a book tour here, i think, was 1992, and it's just always a thrill to come back to seattle. so this is my seventh book, and i had hoped it was going to be my third essay collection, because it's been -- since 1994 since my second one was published. i've written so many things all over the world, i think many

important pieces on religion and history, culture and so on. but my publisher felt that my pieces on sex, gender and feminism have been so prophetic for the last 25 and 30 years that it was urgent to get them out now. so we went forward with this book, and it's absolutely amazing how almost like a tsunami of events in the culture swept forward, and things i wrote in my introduction to this book last summer when i wrote the introduction seemed to speak directly to this moment. my premier principles as a person and as a thinker are free thought and free speech. i am truly a child of the 1960s in that respect. and i am totally opposed to any kind of curtailment of either of those two things for whatever laudable social causes anyone

may think that they have. my particular influences came from my experience in the mid 1960s in college when i entered college, 1964 in the fall, that spring it happened, the free speech movement at berkeley. mario savio is an enormous culture hero to me. in college my influences were heavily the beat poets who, you know, created a great scandal. city lights book shop in 1957, the obscenity trial, you know, the arrest of the manager of city lights bookstore for selling an obscene poem. al ginsburg's howl, these were huge influences on me in college. same thing, lenny bruce. lenny bruce, who is the person when transformed the medium of comedy, stand-up comedy, from merely gags in the vaudeville

style to very satiric, acerbic but meaningful style of analysis of social problems. lenny bruce is the one who made comedy politically and socially relevant. and lenny bruce was an equal opportunity offender. he went against both liberal and conservative, right? and then the first thinker really who had enormous impact on me in adolescence was oscar wilde. by chance in a secondhand bookstore in syracuse, upstate new york, i stumbled on a copy of a book called, it was a british book called "the pep grams -- the end grams of oscar wilde." they thought presumably no one in the u.s. would recognize the word epigram, but they call it the wit and humor of oscar wilde. plays from -- that are organized

by topic, nature be, men and women, etc., etc. oh, this scathing, uncompromising quality of oscar wilde's thinking. huge impact on me. and then in college it was, this was before the stonewall rebellion, before the gay liberation movement. gay men, once they were absolutely scathing, going against every possible social convention. they would say things that would make you wince, like about polio victims and so on, right? now, what happened to that? after stonewall, gay men had had become either increasingly recreational or very p.c. and politicized, all right? and so all of a sudden they're part of the army for the control of speech. but i think, you know, underground gay men are still just as bitchy as ever, i'm happy to say. but in college and graduate school, i began to read the influences of oscar wilde himself which would be bode

lair, march key das sad who was imprisoned. it wasn't that long before i was in college that there was the great trial for obscenity in england by lawdty chatterly's lover, penguin books was charged with obscenity. and when penguin books triumphed, it was a great blow, you know, against the forces of censorship. so that's what i have to stood , and my particular wing of feminism was suppressed for many years. you know, my feminism predates second wave feminism which was created by betty friedan with her co-founding of now in 1966. i was already a feminist, because i was directly impacted by first wave feminism in the early 1960s, 1961, when i was 14 years old. i suddenly became obsessed with amelia earhart after an article about yet another clue was found, whatever it was, that was

in the syracuse herald journal. and i embarked on a three-year research project in high school into amelia earhart. i went to all kinds of places, i ransacked the old newspapers in the bowels of the syracuse library and so on. and also i was obsessed with katherine hepburn who i saw on late night tv. what i was getting from katherine hepburn, i did not realize for decades, was actually the real flame of first-wave feminism. because her mother was the head of the connecticut women's suffrage organization. her aunt was also a campaigner for women suffrage, and hepburn herself campaigned as a small child with balloons, protests, votes for women, etc. so this first impact of 1920s, 1930s after women had just won the right to vote in 1920. and, you know, we wanted to reproduce in my new book the actual page from "newsweek"

magazine in 1963 the letters to the editor where i had -- i was giventhe lead letter to the editor when the soviets launched valentin that -- [inaudible] into space, the first woman to enter space at a time when women were banned from the american space program. and i wrote a protest letter, i was 16 years old. this was before now, okay, was ever found. and i said that -- this happened, she went to space on the very anniversary, 35th anniversary, whatever it was, of amelia earhart flying the atlantic. and i said it's obvious that ms. earhart's quest for equal opportunity for american women still remains to be won. so i was already a feminist before all this happened in the late 1960s. then i tried to join the women's movement. it did not succeed, okay? because the women's movement had all kinds of preconceptions about the suppression of speech, okay? they were anti-rock and roll, all right? anti-art, you know, go down the line.

in the -- i was one of the what we later would call pro-sex feminists. so in the 1970s, for example, you know, i loved charlie's angels, okay? i loved cosmopolitan magazine. meanwhile, the other feminists were occupying helen gurley brown's offices and wanting the whole magazine to be shut down. i loved the bond girls, james bond girls, ursula andress coming out in the white bikini, okay? wearing a knife, etc. i loved the dallas cowboy cheerleaders. all right. so there's no way i could be taken into the women's movement. i was dropped right out of it, you know, right from the start. people said, oh, she was made by -- please, i was not made, okay, by betty friedan. as i say in the book, betty friedan did not create jermaine grieve in australia, and she did not create me in upstate new york, all right?

and it's about time people realized the transformations in women that happened radically in the 20th century are not entirely due to the women's movement. i show in the introduction to this book how many things preceded, okay, the creation of now. i mean, diana rigg in the avengers was in a black leather suit before now doing all that stuff. betty friedan didn't create her either, okay? [laughter] anyway, all right, i don't want to get too sidetracked because this whole thing will turn into that. let me -- i only have a certain amount of time here. so let me see, all right. so what happened was madonna, okay, madonna was so important. i mean, the way madonna is behaving now is such an embarrassment, all right? because the current madonna bears no resemblance to the pioneering madonna of the 1980s and '90s, but she will live forever for what she did. the pro-sex feminist movement of

the 1990s was made possible by madonna's trifling with pornography and exposure of the body and so on, her brilliant videos of the '80s and '90s. i believe they are truly works of art. her great period was 1983-1992, and i periodically do show some of those videos, like vogue and open your heart and so on. and these are truly works of art, okay? so at any rate, it's all of a sudden this long-silenced wing of feminism, the pro-sex wing, bursts forth, okay, in the 1990. there was feminists for free expression, for example, that was i was allied with, i appeared in events in the early 1990s. what we were fighting against was the horrible scourge of political correctness and suppression or free thought and free speech during the 1980s in the anti-porn movement led by katherine mckinnon and andrew dorkin, fanatics. i include in this book what i think is my classic attack on

them. i call them the rebirth of carry nation. and those women, you know, they wrote in ordnance which was adopted by indianapolis and min grab lit -- minneapolis to shut down the sale of men's magazines in those towns on the grounds that supposedly pornography caused violence against women, caused rape, caused murder, etc., etc. these women are deranged, but they ruled the 1980s and feminism. so then, thanks to madonna, my pro-sex wing of feminists rose up, okay, and also was helped along by the lipstickless end beans of san francisco. there was -- lesbians of san francisco. so then we went national, and, you know, and i thought, oh, now we've won. okay, there's no problem, okay? so i kind of retired from the scene in 1994 after, you know, being out there fisticuffs a number of years, and then i went back to what i do. i wrote books on the movies, okay? alfred hitchcock's, "the birds,"

i wrote a book on poetry and the visual arts, and right now, for nine years i've been involved researching native american culture of the northeast. that's what i'm doing. but i have to be, now i have to go back on the road, okay? [laughter] 23 years later i have to return. all of a sudden we've gone full circle again and this horrible scourge of political correctness is back even worse, okay? we have people riding and smashing windows at berkeley, okay? the place, the capital of the free speech movement and so on, okay? so here i am again, okay? [laughter] and i am not happy about it. i'd rather be doing my native american research, okay? all right. now, what else here? oh, how much time do i have? okay. [laughter] how many minutes do i have? oh, ten more minutes. oh, good. okay, all right. so now, a number of things. first of all, what i'm calling for -- the title of my book,

okay, which is "free women, free men," i'm calling for an end to the sex war in feminism. women are well launched now, okay, so this kind of, this reflex, snide, you know, putdowns of men that are everywhere, this has got to stop. now, i notice wherever i go in the world,actually, that upper middle class career women are very unhappy. they're very unhappy, okay? even though they've achieved a certain status, and what i'm saying that feminists have to stop blaming men for their own unhappiness. the unhappiness is due, i believe, to the huge systemic changes that women, you know, for thousands of years women had their own world. there was the world of women, and there was the world of men, and the sexes didn't have that much to do with each other, okay? this is a brand new experiment, to have this new system where now women can be economically

independent now. they're no longer dependent on a father or husband or brother, okay, for the sustenance. and they're working side by side with men in the workplace. all right? this is an experiment. it's never happened before, all right? and what i'm calling, i was saying in the book that we may have to accept a certain amount of tension between the sexes in the workplace. the feminist idea that if we can just suppress men enough, women will be happy. i say no, okay? i say, and it's on the basis of my own experience as a child in an italian-american immigrant community, okay, is that what women have lost is the old solidarity that they once had when they totally ruled the private sphere. women's life all day long was with other women understand -- women once. as well as the children. it was a huge tribal experience. and now what women are feeling is a sense of isolationing and

loneliness -- isolationing and loneliness, disconnection from their old function. i'm not saying to go back. that's not what i'm saying. i'm just saying stop blaming men, all right? for example, these marches that just happened, okay, people -- the women were exhilarated, they were almost hysterical. i don't think it had anything to do with feminism or anti-trump. it was women suddenly felt that surge of happiness again for being with oh women, all right? -- with other women. you actually see it in the odd city when to disyous is washed up naked and alone, he's lost his ship, and he wakes to the sound of girls', women's voices laughing and singing. it's the princess going down to do the laundry on the shore, okay? and actually that is exactly what was going on up until fairly recently where women were all together, they did all the chores together. they did the laundry, they did the cooking. i can remember this from my

childhood in upstate new york. the immigrant italian women. all four of my grandparents plus my mother were byrne in italy. id -- were born in italy. i actually had that experience in the agrarian era. women all together. it's like my mother would describe as a small child in italy how all the women would get together to do the laundry and go up the hill to the fountain cut out of the side of a mountain. probably went back thousands of years to the roman period and so on. she remembered the singing, the picnicking, etc., etc., okay? so enooh though people were lay -- even though people were laboring physically, there was a happiness, okay? a sense of identity. there was no quest for identity. now, it's no place for an independent thinker, okay? if you were an independent thinker, you had no options as a woman except to become a nun. [laughter] okay, so i know i would have been a nun, okay, a hundred years ago. i know it, okay?

and, obviously, communities are intellectually repress i have in their own way -- repressive in their own way. nevertheless, we're in a period now of quest for identity, tremendous pressures on young people to form their own identity separate from those old, automatic tribal and community affiliations. so i think there's a tremendous -- i mean, as a classroom teacher, you know, of now more than 40 years, i can see this. and it's really, you know, this is a tremendous sense of psychological dislocation among young people. and they find many ways to the try to achieve some sorts of identity. and part of it right now, of course, is social media which is costing the total entropy in terms of ability to reason and to read, to write, you know, the old things. [laughter] so on. now, i'm also calling for an end to this insanity of excluding biology, okay, from p gender studies. how in the world did this happen, all right?

how did women's studies and gender studies end up teaching about gender without any reference whatever to biology or to hormones? and right now post-structuralism dominates gender studies everywhere. i mean, i spent six months writing my dissection of fuco, okay, 27 years ago. an assignment, hello, anyone who thinks that fuco is somehow, you know, the master of the universe has clearly not read my exposure of him in junk bonds incorporators, all right? the man was a fraud, i'm sorry, okay? [laughter] compared to freud, okay? i mean, freud's out and fuco is in. the post-structuralists, right, you know, pose as leftists, all right? but what were they doing in the past few decades with this crazy, parasitic growth of this administrator master class,

okay, that has taken over the universities? right? at a period of obscene, okay, rise in tuition costs, student debt that's crippling families and so on. where were these leftists, the great leftists, okay, on our college campuses, okay? were they resisting the administrators, okay? were they denouncing student debts? okay, were they lamenting the plight of adjunct teachers and so on? no, they were all running to conferences talking about fuco with their stupid elitist jargon. [laughter] that's leftism? these post-structuralists are the worst mercenary careerists, okay, in this country, right? the leading post-structuralists and new historicists are retiring as multimillion mares -- millionaires, and they pose as leftists, okay? it is a scandal. forget fuco, for heaven sakes. absolutely absurd. so we have to bring biology and

authentic study of, you know, of medicine, of anthropology, of history, you know, back into gender studies. that's one thing i'm definitely calling for. now, aside from these things, okay -- oh. i'm on the warpath against, okay, the bureaucracy of the campuses, okay? at bennington college, my first job in the 1970s, we actually -- 1976, we had an uprising, okay, as faculty against the trustees and the administrators, you know, the president of that college. and it was like huge, publicized. nora ephron wrote it up for "esquire magazine" and so on, and the faculties are totally castrated. what are they doing? the faculties have been marginalized in this country. they didn't utter a peep as this administrator master class took over, the administrators who are in league with federal mandate, federal authorities in washington. i mean, we're living in an age of stalinism right now, okay? and, again, the leftists, you

know, they talk a big talk, okay, but they do nothing where it really matters, okay? which is demand, you know, 50% reduction in the number of administrators, okay? and also 75% reduction in their salaries, okay, which often exceeds that of the faculty members. people should realize how many of the ills that i'm decrying about this oppression of speech and free thought on campus is coming from the administrators, okay, who are these, you know, who are these social welfare do-gooders. oscar wilde, okay, was absolutely scathing about these humanitarians, these aggressive philanthropists who dominated the victorian period. oh, okay. i had the feeling you were looming there. [laughter] all right. at any rate, in terms of other things in the book, there's a reprint of what i consider an important piece of mine in time magazine where i called for the end of this outrageous age 21 law in the united states where young people cannot buy a beer,

okay? do you know nowhere in the world except in very repressive regimes, right, you know, like the united arab emirates9 and so on there's something like that. exactly what -- mothers against drunk driving, okay? they wandered into an area here that has been extremely destructive. when that rule was passed in in1984, what did young people do unable to drink? they began taking the club drugs, of course, ec thatty and all this crap that they take into their bodies. and what's happened to the ability, you know, of young people to go to a bar, learn how to drink in a sensible way, in an adult context, be able to sit with the op to sit sex -- opposite sex, learn how to talk, how to flirt, discuss ideas, okay? it's absolutely a cruel law. you can buy marijuana in colorado, and young people can't get a glass can of beer when they arrive in college? do you know how outrageous that

is? why aren't you more outraged, okay? [laughter] that has to end. what else here? [laughter] okay. let's see, okay, oh, i've hit quite a few things, this is really good. [laughter] oh, yes. so just to return to what i was saying about the, about the, you know, the solidarity of women in the agrarian period, i think that probably part of my ability to analyze things comes from my exposure to almost like kind of a capsule, condensed version of human history. i experienced the agrarian era through my contact with those powerful country women who had immigrated, and there's a whole piece in my book about southern women, about, you know, the power of the rural paradigm and the strength of southern women and soon. but we were, a whole up to of us

really from italy, concentrated in this area of the triple cities in upstate new york because of the shoe factories. they had jobs in the shoe factories. i then had the a direct experience of the industrial era which followed the agrarian era. my grandfather, everyone in the town went to the factories which dominated endicott with the smokestacks in that period before environmental laws. the soot would be heavy, you know, on window sills. you could smell the tanning pools and so on. so i had the experience of the industrial era. and then my father, fresh out of the paratroopers in world war ii, was able to go to college on the g.i. bill. i was born while he was in college. my parents married at 20 and had me at 21, so he was like mopping the cafeteria floor, the only member of his large family to go to college. then he became a high school teach and then a professor -- teacher and then a professor in syracuse.

so we moved into the new service sector economy. so i had, in my own life i've experienced all these transitions in human history. so i think it's given me a kind of insight into change. now, what i'm saying in the book is that those women, the country women were more powerful, okay, than any feminist, okay? they were physically powerful, literally, in that period before automatic washers and dryers. everyone did laundry by hand. i can remember my grandmother washing on the back porch with a washboard, okay? they were powerful, like this. and these women had big voices, okay, and big attitudes. i mean, once when my father was teaching high school in the small farming town of oxford, new york, we lived for a year on the upper floor of a farmhouse, and there was a hilarious moment. my father was out with his brother, they were sitting outside smoking a cigarette, and suddenly, you know, the farm woman yelled at them, okay?

a of calf had escaped from the barn, and she said, stop her, okay, to my father and my uncle. and the calf thundered by. my father and my uncle just stepped backwards as it went by, and the farmer chased the calf and came back carrying the calf, all right? as she's -- she said, men. [laughter] okay? those were the women. for thousands of years, country women had physical power and mental power, and they were the equals of men. in fact, it's no coincidence that the first states and territories to give women the right to vote or were in the west, okay? the pie year areas -- pioneer areas where it was obvious that women were the equals of men whereas right to the very end the educated states, the states where the great universities were like in pennsylvania and new york state, massachusetts and so on refused to grant women the right to vote. not until the constitutional

amendment was a passed in 1920. it's because the differential between the upper middle class men and upper middle class women, okay, in the late 19th century and early 20th century was very profound, okay? a lady seemed to be a different entity, seemed to be far more emotional, tended to faint, tended to be delicate, etc. so the idea of granting such women, however admirable, the right to vote was not as easy as it was for the territories. you want me to -- >> [inaudible] >> okay. maybe -- okay. why don't we just move to the question period then, because i love the question period, and i'm sure you would too. >> [inaudible] >> hi. >> hi. >> thank you. i didn't know this talk was happening until just recently, so i'm really happy i stayed, and thank you for coming.

.... .... >> all genders, all races, kind of thing. >> i am calling for men to control again of their own lives. right? i have said in a recent interview that if there is a woman's center at yale university, which there is for the undergraduates, there should be a men's center.

the men should be free to do whatever they want in the men's center. ahh it is an outrage. i explain that in my first book by saying woman's power is so enormous men had to go out and create these structures. it is men who are doing of the hardest j dirtiest work in society. i told in a recent interview, i made a whole list of things,

when there is an ice storm, it is the men who go out at 2:00 a.m. i never see women manning manning the great vat of tar people are mixing to put on the roof. i never see the women, i saw an enormous sewage break in a neighboring town and men in hazmat suits were up to their knees in waste water. not a single woman want to volunteer for that kind of work. people are still depending on men and keeping working class men invisible. they are entitled talking about leaning in and i think in

general the contributions of men and working clas people are erased and this has to stop. we need more enlightened feminism. i think most men are in favor of rising in society. i want men to recover a sense of who they are as men. >> what you are saying is

offensive to me as a cis gendered man living in the year of 2017. to the point about the ice storms in the east and how women are not fighting them why don't you think about institutions like road crews and the micro-egressions and sexism on these crews of the working class men. i am a landscaper and i can tell you there is a huge degree of dash my question is did you believe sexism is relevant? nowhere in there is a discussion of sexism in the workplace and women are treated as less smart and capable. it seems your words reinforce

this motion. >> i believe in the advances of removing all obstacles to women progressing in society in the professional realm. what i am saying is we are not working individuals. i talked about the psychological dream life of mankind. there are all kinds of primitive impulses in us. do we want to understand ourselves as human beings or what? we cannot simply define human beings in terms of what we are in the workplace or in the political realm.

i believe that was actually the biggest legacy of the 1960s. they were about turning away from materialistic careerism and embarking on a cosmic quest for meaning in the universe. i think my work offers a dual perspective. i am talking about women's advances in society and what helps that. i am also talking about our need as human beings to expand our imaginations. even though i am an athi -- atheist i have a relationship with the ancient native americans. i believe my views of things represented in a sexual persona

are very much in vibe with that. >> i haven't read any of your books but i have seen your videos. i am a fan. anyway, i can't remember which video it was but you were talking about college education and you are fed up with the whole cafeteria style invent your own major. you think we should go back to a survey sort of. i graduated from college a couple months ago and network took a survey course in my life. i want to talk about what you think the benefit of that type of education. >> i think it is an absolute disaster what happened in the last 30 yours. the decline in the cafeteria menu where young people arrive and say you can take this and this and this.

i think that gives the broad view, the abandonment of the great art history survey class is a cultural disaster. what used to be two semesters begin with the stone age and move all the way down by the end of the second semester to abstract expressionism. there is a narrative in history. there is. i have talked about the pillar and that can be seen 5,000 years later in embankments all over the united states and europe and so n.

people who deal with artifacts can recognize the history and lega legacy. colleges need to be stripped down and making decisions about what they are going to teach. i have been saying the best multi culterism woob would be to teach students the religions of the world. if my plan had been followed we had not have the misunderstandings about islam. people would know about the sacred test and say this group is following these particular verses of the koran and you wouldn't be this chaos you have now.

this is minor. it is a minor part of human existence. it is something much bigger. much much bigger. the universe. i am not saying not to demand social reform or seize to be progressive and look for the most unjust human society possible. but i am saying this is a betrayal of the legacies of the '60s and the cosmic vision of the 1960s. i have written about this and

the reason is the apostles of that particular spiritual are lost to us because they took so much lsd they never came back. they never wrote the brooks which should have been companion to my own work. thank you for your question. >> thank you for coming. i read sexual persona during a time when i was recovering from an infant with sexism and workplace sexism affects women. what can male allies doo to help alleviate the common problem in the workplace? >> i am saying a real man is honorable. a real man respects women.

to prove this, i had to write a 700 page book. i am also calling for middle class girls to stop asking for special protections. again, i want equality of treatment in the workplace. what too many white upper middle class girls are bringing now to the workplace is a certain manner of speaking that is removed from the actual harshness of the world. working class women, whether they come from the farmland or the street, understand the risks

and dangers of the world from a controversial writing i have done is about the need for women to be amazon warriors for themselves. it is up to women to understand the dangers of the world. not expect the world to be an ex tension of their protected comfortable middle clas living room. i see women whose voices are not strong enough. i see too many cases by women who feel this is demeaning and accept it. no, no. the first time it happens you speak out.

you speak out. you stop it and you are in their face immediately. that is what i believe i represent which is that every moment of every day you have a responsibility to protect your own dignity. it doesn't matter if you are embarrassed or create an embarrassing situation you protect yourself. the girls had to sign in at 11:00 in the dorms and the guys could run free all night. it was my generation who said we want the same treatment as men. we want the equality and freedom that men enjoy. and the colleges said no, the

world is dangerous and we must protect you. and we said give us the freedom to risk rape. freedom. freedom is the value. not protection. okay? so it dismays me to see young women today wanting the parent figures back, wanting the over sight, wanting to run to committees which something goes wrong on a date. i think women have to stop doing that. that is the only way women will ever be totally free and equal. >> you just mentioned you compared the agarian with the

physicalness of the era that created the strength of men and women and going into the modern area where people became more fragi fragille. we are removing stresses and efforts from the environment. >> i am concerned, yes. the technology today has become our art form. there is no doubt that the constant evolution of our handheld devices and the equivalent of art forms in another society. but i am concerned about our obsessive dependency on this. i love the web and i have been part of it. but i am concerned because i see a pattern from ancient history which is when you have empires which become extremely affluent and complicated with a complex

structure and everything gets so interwoven it is easy for it to collapse. you will get an affluent class that is tolerant, hedonistic and anything goes. the ancient roman period they are vacationing on capri and in pompeii. i am concerned we are headed toward a civilization that is so complex and so dependent on other people and on electric power all it will take is one gigantic astroid burst that takes down the power grid and all of a sudden mankind is going

to be scrabbling back to the primitive and barbaric realm again. i do feel concern about the agility of our culture and removal from nature. with secular humanism is also gone this vision i was talking about and the lack of this larger perspective. yes, i don't -- yeah, i think there is reason to -- i will shadows coming, yes. >> do you know exit from this cycle? >> in my theory of history it is cyclic. i believe everything -- i think organic patterns in history. things begin, great ideas, high energy, it grows to a certain point, and then you start to get the decadence. i love decadence.

that is why i am very interested in androgyny. i consider myself transgender and i think people are starting to understand my book, "sexual persona" was a transgender book. it because a transgender protest. finally people are starting to wake up to that. >> so nice to see a second native of -- to see another second tier southerner. we had a common upbringing and our fathers knew each other.

you are very big on extanded -- extended family, clan and tribe. what do you see how to make this relevant in the 21st century? >> i am not sure we can ever recover that tribal connectedness any longer. but i see it surviving for working class families much more than upper middle class families. i notice this, for example, when going to the new jersey shore just to walk on the beach and so on. i see in those working class resorts like the wild wood how often you have multi generations of families vacationing together. it makes me nostalgic. that is governne from the upper middle class.

the more affluent you are the less likely you will travel with your parents. when people run off to the expensive re-sorts they are not taking the grand parents with them. but working class families in philadelphia, every week you see immigrant families and african-american families coming for a day in the park with the food, toys, football, etc and take park benches and the barbecue pitts spending the whole day there. multiple generations at the park. every time i see that takes me back to what i remember which is everyone knowing each other, the people who came from the same town in italy and people would grow up next to each other. people didn't move. today we are in a transient culture.

people get jobs and go hundreds of thousands of miles away flaum family. it is great difficulty for to manage a family and job. the collapse of the old extended family in the nuclear family. i think the nuclear family is toxic and this is what conservatives talking about the need for a two-parent family and so on. i am going throughout most of human history there has never been a two-parent family. it has been multi generation family raising children. how we line up next to people are toxing cubicles for neurosis. i don't think that has ever been

a healthy prescription for children to be raised. another thing is the women that benefited enormously from the invention of labor saving appliances like the washer and drier because it sames women so much time. but now today, the laundry, which used to be a communeical activity with other women has turned into an isolated lonely thing. you are trapped in the house doing laundry and the higher up you rise affluence the lez likely you know the neighbors. you would never ask them to watch your children in an

affluent neighborhood whereas into working class neighborhood people would do that. they are oriented to the street and watching sitting on the porch. there is a sense of a neighborhood that is like a real community of the old days. i think as people move up the economic scale in terms of affluence and power in the workplace they are actually getting more and more neurotic because of the psychological dislocations that haven't been fully confronted. i don't know how to recover these things but i think it is useful for women to realize how much they lost in terms of solidarity with other women. >> thank you for being here.

i am pretty interested in politics. >> i view the victory of trump as the response to the failure of the democratic party to confront real problems, long standing problems that the democrats have no solution to. i thought it was a mistake for the dnc to push hillary clinton through as the nominee. and i don't think -- i wish there had been younger candidates in both parties. i think it is time for my generation to get off the stage for heavens sake.

i wanted nominees for both parties to be younger people in their 40s or early 50s. i don't know how it happened that we ended up with so many older nominees. i hope this is going to be a great blast of energy into the the political system soon. there are real issues about job creation and other things. reduction of the federal bureaucracies wasn't an issue the democrats were helpless with. that is an octopus, a parasite, whether it is in washington or on college campuses. they are soulless. the minute you allow any entity

to be run by bureaucrats we are in trouble. i don't call that progressive. democrats have to come up with better solutions and they will start winning again. thank you. >> i would like to ask you to talk about the differences between men and women that you think are really important whether they are hard wired or have developed over thousands of years in feeling and thinking and sex drive and workplace whatever you want to say about that. >> i analyze this at length in sexual persona. yes, i speak about biological factors and the way the mind works. for example, it is slightly satirical in chapter one which i

am right. boys have to learn because of their genital anatomy how to aim. if they don't learn how to aim they will soil the walls and everything else. they must learn to aim and that carries over into the sex act. so i talk about that and talk about the focus and directiveness and how freud talks about how primitive man pre primed himself on the ability to put out a fire with a strand of urine but beyond the scope of any woman who would scorch her hands in the process of trying to put out a fire and i think as

civilizations evolve, that gender has the performance quality and ultimately there are fundamental sexual differences that come from the fact that most men have 8-10 times the amount of testosterone than women do. i have noticed the way men talk and think is different. hetereosexual men. i remember my father saying when he would listen to the women talking, my brother and aunts, he said he could never follow the conversation. that there were no names being used.

i have talked to men saying he saw she saw? that is why i loved the real house wives. they record how women are in a group and maybe not descenting woman or lesbian women. but heterosexual women. i love to be around heterosexual women. it is a weird energy women have with each other and it goes back to the hunter gather era where the women were all talking with each other while the men went off in the hunting party and had to be quiet and silent while they stalked the prey. the talkative men didn't last long.

the history of the arts was created in the middle ground. that transgender shaming had a vision of the universe, intuitive quality, but biologically speaking, every sell of the human body has dna code and tells you what the actual gender of that body is. i think there is a lot of talk about the ability to change sex. you can take hormones but every single cell in the human body continues to show it is male or

female except were a tiny number of intersex people. i don't know what i belong to. i never thought of myself as female never for a minute or day in my life but i don't feel like a man either. i am willing to acknowledge i have gender dysphoria and my books are my sex change. that is the truest thing people say about sexual persona was by a gay guy in massachusetts who ran the gay and lesbian review.

nevertheless, i call my book this. transgender people gain identity from the existence of the mass of men and women. i applaud you as a man. >> thank you so much for being bold and innovative. i grow up baptist and made the jump to libertarianism. in my perspective, it is about empowerment and the party women should be migrating to. how do we draw more women to the

libertarian philosophy and explain it is the party of the powerment whereas the democrats idea is replace men with the government whereas the libertarian philosophy is to empower women while empowering men. >> i call myself libertarian even though i am not part of the party. the male figures which we used to depend on and i think we need many more parties in the united stat states. it becomes a pourage.

countries that have multiple parties, over 13 parties, are very fractured. they have to form coalitions to govern so i can see the difficulty of multiple parties in a country of our size. but there is absolutely no doubt we need drastic reform of the present party structure and i think it will only come from the challenge and i am trying to develop the green party, too even though i don't agree with everything they stand for. would you say in terms of your economic policy as a libertarian do you tend more toward the conservative or capitalist? >> i find myself to be fiscally conservative. i think that free enterprise brought more people out of poverty than any government program and i have traveled overseas and seen that. i think we are facing a situation where we have burdensome regulation and taxation that is suppressing

small businesses and individuals to the advantage of too big to fail corporations. we bail out the banks and kick out the homeowners. so, yes, i would say i am fiscally conservative. >> i feel what we need in the inner cities is the teaching of entrepreneurship to dishaven disadvantaged youth. i definitely believe in a much more jobs-oriented educational system at the high school and college level. >> thank you so much. keep doing what you are doing. be the change. >> thank you. very good. no more questions? all right. well thank you very much for

coming. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this is booktv on c-span2. television for serious readers. here is our prime time lineup. first up at 6:45 p.m. eastern, panel discussion on the state of the media and then we talk about privilege in today's society. at 9:00, former chief of the

nypd internal affairs unit talks about investigating police corruption. at 10:00 p.m. eastern it is sharon wine burg on defense and technology. at 10:50 we wrap up with pj o'rourke reflecting on the 2016 presidential election. that happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. >> this is henrietta levit. she was looking at images taken from south america because the whole sky had to be covered. there was a second observeivation in peru. she was looking at images of the clouds and discovered a couple thousand variable stars and made

a fundamental discovery about the pattern of variation that the stars that took the longest time to go through their cycles tended to be the brightest tars. that observation led to the first usable yard stick for measuring what we call galactic distances in space. >> it would be pair to say at

that time they were not sure if the universe was just a few houn thousand light years across and that was it. >> that was it. this led to us looking at the geometry and place ourselves within that. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. [inaudible conversations]