Parents often exhort people in their 20s to put off responsibility. In a persistent state of childishness, the parents can see nothing better than remaining free from meaningful relationships and deep and challenging work. Never mind that human fulfillment is found in self-sacrifice, staying unattached, and thus unfulfilled, has become the unspoken goal of going on three generations.
There are also the educational and professional barriers to meaningful relationships and attachment. For many a professional woman, no greater horror can be imagined than marrying at 22 and birthing a baby every other year thereafter. Putting off marriage and motherhood is the preferred route, the only humane route, we are told. In order to be a consummate professional, one must have the tenacity—read: selfishness—to avoid any meaningful commitment to a person or institution.
But what is lost in this schema? What unique benefits of a society of young parents have disappeared in the dawning of our current gerontocracy?
Ever interesting and occasionally electrifyingly insightful, Camille Paglia has something to say on the matter. Discussing with Jordan Peterson the preciousness of sheltered co-eds who need a committee to referee their dates on campus, Paglia drew an illustrative contrast between herself and her sister. She said, “My parents were 20 when they married, and 21 when they had me. My father went to college on the GI bill getting out of World War II. So, when I was born, my father was still in college and was sweeping floors and so on.” She continued, “I am the product of young parents. Nature wants, actually, young parents…my parents had the energy, this youthful energy, this ‘can-do’ spirit that came out of World War II, and so on. I’m a product of that.”
Paglia was born in Endicott, a small town in upstate New York, in 1947. Both sides of her family had recently emigrated from Italy, and her surroundings have been described as “in many ways like a rural Italian village.” She spent her early childhood in Oxford, New York, where she and her parents lived on a dairy farm. Over the years, her father attended graduate school and became a professor of Romance languages at LeMoyne College in Syracuse.
Only then, after a dramatic change of life, did Paglia’s sister, Lenora, join the family when Paglia was 14. Paglia told Peterson, “My father at this point was a college professor. So she had completely different parents than I did. So she has very excellent manners…she’s completely different.”
Demure and well-mannered are not words readily associated with Paglia, who, among other eccentricities, was fired for Bennington College for kicking a student and engaging in a fist fight. There’s also the years she spent defending perverse pornography and pederasty, a stance that has, thank God, softened with time. She likens her entire career and raison d’etre to the time at summer camp she dropped too much lime in the outhouse and caused a sewage-filled explosion in the latrine. Not a pretty image! Paglia prophesies about her latrine explosion episode, “I would be someone who would look into the latrine of culture, into pornography and crime and psychopathology . . . and I would drop the bomb into it.”
Yet, Paglia’s extreme argumentative nature, intellectual tenacity, and contrarianism have their benefits. A reviewer in the New York Times noted, “She positions herself with Ross Perot, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, who ‘with our raging egomania and volatile comic personae tending toward the loopy, helped restore free speech to America.’” There is something helpful about this intellectual gadfly incessantly questioning comfortable assumptions that have no basis in reality.
What, specifically, about having young parents would lend itself to the formation of such an iconoclast? The child of young parents is less likely to be sheltered and coddled. So prone to developmental selfishness themselves, parents in their late-teens and early twenties are not generally inclined to spoil their children. It would be a mistake to think that older parents are necessarily less selfish. With decades of sin forming the habits of their independent adulthood, many older parents display a much more destructive selfishness in coddling and attempting to possess their offspring.
Additionally, young parents still have the foolishness of the young, a persistent belief that results will surpass realistic predictions. Many a young person is dissuaded from marriage, babies, ambitious business ventures, and robust living by fearful older people. The fears are warranted, accurate predictions, even. But the whole world benefits from the ignorance and indominable spirit of young adults who do too much, have too many children, and dare to think that marriage can be a lasting commitment.
There are, of course, many readily available examples of how disastrous outcomes can be for the ambitious young. We should refrain from too much focus on these, however, because the end result of stifling adolescent freedom is too great a price to pay—for all of us.
Now, to leave off, here are a few of Paglia’s best-loved lines from her dissertation Sexual Personae that capture her youthful, unrelenting energy, sometimes so off-the-mark and sometimes so unsettlingly insightful: “If civilization had been left in female hands, we would still be living in grass huts” and “There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” Contrary to received wisdom and glib statements of the feminist air we breath, Paglia’s words pack a punch (or kick, as the case may be). Indeed, as one reviewer wrote,reading Paglia’s work can be “a bit like being mugged.”
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