I was that way a bit in college when I felt confused and directionless. I felt empowered by the feminist rhetoric.

It didn’t last long. I realized I was playing a role because I had not figured out my role.

It’s behind the trans mania, I think. Another look-at-me movement.

Cappy, 1978.

Hope you’re enjoying the holiday.

==

Shulamith Firestone withdrew from public life entirely around about 1971. She made one intervention in the ensuing four decades, and that was a collection published in 1998 on the subject of navigating the world of psychiatry and it’s affiliates.

Firestone was a schizophrenic. Her job, from 1971 until the end of her life, was to get through the day. (She may or may not have had regular employment in that time; every case is different).

JOAN DIDION, THE GREAT CONTRARIAN:

Joan Didion, who inspired a generation of young writers including this one, died Thursday. She was a lot of things, but one of them: she was a brilliant contrarian. My favorite of her pieces skewered the trendy movements around her.

When hippies were cool, where was Joan Didion? She was writing the darkest portraits of the movement that were ever made. She was showing readers the preschool-aged child whose parents gave her LSD. She went to the beating heart of the utopian progressive movement of the era–in the heart of the city where I was born and raised–and she showed what the unmooring looks like up close.

In “Where the Kissing Never Stops,” Didion gives us a hilarious take-down of Joan Baez’s Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, where well-meaning young hippies wander glassy-eyed across her pages. Here’s Didion on Baez’s right hand man:

“Ira Sandperl is a forty-two-year-old native of St. Louis who has, besides the beard, a shaved head, a large nuclear-disarmament emblem on his corduroy jacket, glittering and slightly messianic eyes, a high cracked laugh and the general look of a man who has, all his life, followed some imperceptible but fatally askew rainbow.”

Here on Baez: “To encourage Joan Baez to be ‘political’ is really only to encourage Joan Baez to continue ‘feeling’ things, for her politics are still, as she herself said, ‘all vague.’”

She ends the piece with Baez standing in front of the refrigerator eating potato salad with her fingers.

The Didion I read would quietly find the flabbiest bits of American culture. She was ruthless and funny. She was not on your side. She wasn’t on anyone’s side. If Didion had been working these past few years, I have no doubt who she’d be writing about.

https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/493254/

Indeed.

In the ‘70’s I was the happy uncritical audience of much Feminist “literature”; especially Simone de Beauvoir. ~No regrets. But will get The White Album very soon.

I was watching some obscure movie last night and the main character (a failing actor) walked past a movie marquee featuring “Play It As It Lays.” So I found a streaming version of that and watched it.

It’s quite dark, though the last few lines in the film suggest a more tongue-in-cheek and whimsical viewpoint than I would have guessed without those lines.

That’s a good point. Paglia has some brilliant insights… I still think she’s mostly a performative head case, but at least she’s highly intelligent and can make the sparks fly… Not some joyless scold. And it’s sobering just how much she’s been unpersoned these last several years for not hewing to the Party Line. It used to be hard to go a month without reading something by or about her.