Camille PagliaUs name function like a verbal Rorschach test. At its mention people will either smile or snarl; few fail to have any reaction at all. Many laugh, then quickly move on to heated debate. Odd quotes, heretic incidents, and public debacles are brought up. Her views serve as an even stronger catalyst in academic circles and media discourse. People can't seem to make up their minds. SheUs hilarious, sheUs evil, sheUs a goddess. The truth is that she lies somewhere in the center; her arguments are infinitely arguable, a mixture of macho pride and feminine aesthetics packaged in provocative snippets.
Her prose bristles with defiance. She has been hailed as feminismUs savior and antichrist. In Sexual Personae, she discusses the competing Puritan and Pagan aspects of Western culture. Her subsequent sets of essay collections, Sex, Art, and American Culture and Vamps and Tramps, continue her crusade against the standard rhetoric about sexual roles. She bases her aesthetic on the provocative Q both philosophical and physical. True to her 60s ideals, Paglia still questions authority and exalts paganism. She clearly enjoys the havoc she wreaks.
Yet for all her showmanship, Paglia has substance. Her sound bites cap detailed theories about gender and culture that run the gamut from Plato to pantyhose. Her exaltation of popular culture confounds classicists, while her defense of the canon angers multiculturalists. Is she a conservative or a liberal? It is better to judge her as an individual, on her own merits Q a philosophy that she espouses on a variety of issues, and which recurs frequently within her philosophy.
Even so, her sides are clearly demarked Q get on the wrong one and youUre liable to find your name at the end of a pointed phrase. She excels as a media maverick, twisting work and image to her own ends and the audienceUs entertainment. So sit back and enjoy the show.
YJE: How would you define feminism and do you consider yourself a feminist?
CP: Yes, I consider myself 100 percent a feminist, at odds with the
feminist establishment in America. For me the great mission of feminism
is to seek the full political and legal equality of women with men.
However, I disagree with many of my fellow feminists as an equal
opportunity feminist, who believes that feminism should only be
interested in equal rights before the law. I utterly oppose special
protection for women where I think that a lot of the feminist
establishment has drifted in the last 20 years.
The hot button issue that I have become notorious for is date rape.
The modern independent woman has to be fully responsible for her behavior
and experiences in every social encounter. I do not want a situation
where we have women running to authority figures to intervene for them
with men.
In 1964, I arrived at college at a time when women were second class
citizens and there was an elaborate system of protectionism. We were
kept in sexually segregated dorms under lock and key. While the men
could go out all night long, we had to be in at 11:00 p.m. and sign in.
The colleges were acting in loco parentis Q in place of the parent Q and
they in effect said to us, RWe must protect you. The world is a
dangerous place Q you could be raped.S And what we women of the 60s said
was, RGive us the freedom to risk rape Q we want equality with men.S
Truly free modern women must expect the possibility that they can be
attacked if they are going to go out with strangers. I cannot stand the
young feminists of the late 80s and 90s who demand that authority figures
come back into sex. We women of the 60s shoved authority figures out of
sex.
What I am saying is very radical. I feel that true rape is stranger
rape or where violence is used as part of a sex act to coerce. We cannot
have this fascist situation of Rhe said, she saidS in the absence of
physical evidence of actual rape, even if there is evidence of sexual
contact. One of the costs of modern feminism is that women must be like
gay men who understand that every date is a sexual encounter. Every
woman must regard a date as a possibility for mixed messages. If she is
very religious, if she plans to be a virgin until marriage, if she is not
sure about the person that she is with, she should be absolutely safe and
she must guard herself. If a woman goes to a manUs apartment on the
first time she meets him, she is consenting to sex. ThatUs what it
means. I am sick and tired of women saying, RWell, he just invited me in
for a drink.S ThatUs called mixed messages. If you want to be safe,
stay out in the public lounge.
Why are women wanting to redefine themselves in nineteenth century
terms? ItUs like these white middle class girls who are so innocent:
"Oh, I'm afraid to hear any dirty words and dirty language. What if he
tries to attack me?" Oh, protect yourself from the parent figures of
society. It is an insult to women.
We women of the 60s were very bawdy: we used four letter words like
sailors, we went out and picked up men. I picked up men P I picked up
women P from bars. I saw danger as it was, but I wanted the sexual
adventurism that has always been part of male experience and that can
lead to beating and death.
Everyone in the gay male world knows that the price of sexual
adventure can be death, so I am tired of young women regarding themselves
as a special class that somehow wants a perfect experience. They want to
be nice, they want to be cool, they want to be popular, and they donUt
want any danger. They want the entire world to be a pacified bourgeois
suburban zone. I am tired of this.
CP: The double standard that I felt my generation was all about
demolishing has returned and I have had to conclude that the double
standard is in fact roughly based on biological facts. When I was young,
in the 50s and 60s, I thought that the double standard was the product of
historical discrimination against women. I thought that it was simply a
means for men to control the sex lives of women, because a man must be
sure that the child his wife has given birth to is in fact his own.
Therefore, here was a kind of literal imprisonment enforced on women,
because only women really know if a pregnancy is because of a husband or
a random encounter in a barn.
Over time, I realized that there were real biological distinctions,
in terms of sexual fate Q that nature profits from male promiscuity where
a male distributes his seed over a wide range. I began to realize that a
woman who is promiscuous beyond the early experimental period and makes
it a lifetime style in a way that gay men have done, is crazy, neurotic,
psychotic Q a woman who has no sense of identity or integrity. I began
to see and I was shocked.
My gay friends will say to me, RWhatUs the problem?S And I say that
anal sex is not the same thing as vaginal sex because the vaginal canal
goes right to the womb, to the heart of a womanUs sexual identity, the
heart of nature itself. I began to feel that there was some invisible
source keeping me from a numerical extreme of female sexual adventures.
So reluctantly, as I say, year after year, decade after decade, I
had to acknowledge that there were these biological differences. The
folly of 70s and 80s feminism has been a failure to realize this.
I'm not a biological determinist because, as I say in the first page
of Sexual Personae, sexuality is an intricate intersection of nature and
culture. Both are very powerful elements in formation of our sexuality,
and for too long feminism has scanted the biological side. Feminism has
refused to acknowledge that the womanUs hormonal system is fantastically
complex and affects our moods. We need much more of a balance between
social science and natural science in feminism.
YJE: In Vamps and Tramps, you say that seduction needs encouragement in our society. Meaning what?
CP: For all the talk and hysteria about date rape, the reality is not
overly libidinous men. The main problem is that men are shrinking.
Not at the football schools where men are men, where athletes rule,
where the woman are happy to be women and be very glamorous young women
too. There are a very small number of sexual identity problems clustered
in gay activist and feminist organizations.
It is different at the elite schools, however. When I returned to
the Cross Campus Library in 1980, I saw the incredibly bizarre ladiesU
room graffiti with all kinds of metaphors of nausea and disgusting hatred
and isolation. I said something has gone wrong in feminism with these
young women in turmoil. Only later did all the talk come out about the
anorexia and bulimia and eating disorders.
There is a disastrous problem with sexual identity at the elite
schools. I donUt know whether the young women see the kind of young men
who are going to these schools as very sexually aggressive or intrusive,
but that is not the case. From Williams to Brown to Yale, the young men
are fresh faced, genteel bourgeois boys who were raised in professional
households with very active mothers. They are boys with good manners,
boys who are very sensitive, boys with their masculinity hardly visible.
When I teach in Philadelphia at Art School, and then go up to
Harvard, the difference is hilarious. On the streets of central
Philadelphia, I see real men, African-American men, Italian-American men
from South Philly, real masculine men, and thatUs a compliment. They
have no doubt about their sexual identity. Most men of the world donUt.
The only men that are in doubt about their sexual identity are in
the Ivy League schools, the professors and faculty as well. The women at
Ivy League schools are constantly saying to the men, RYouUre being like
this, youUre being like that, you shouldnUt be like that.S All the men
are hectored; they are on womenUs leashes. It's hilarious that the
virulent anti-male rhetoric is coming out of the Ivy League schools where
there is not a virile masculine man in sight.
Young women in the non-Ivy League schools have no doubt about their
sexual identities either. The girls tend to dress more sexually. They
are overtly female in the way they dress. They scorn the androgynous
style that is popular in the Ivy League. They wear so much perfume that
I had to speak to them about it. It would be considered vulgar for any
undergraduate woman of an elite school to wear that much perfume P it
means that you are trying to trap a man. The same with hair spray and
cosmetics and so on.
People in the Ivy League world then go off into media or into the
law, moving in this weirdly special zone of demasculinized men who have
planed down their personalities to fit in with powerful women. These are
literate men, men who may jog, may go to health clubs, but theyUre not
particularly physical men, not aggressive men.
There is a kind of eunuchization of men on those campuses, and
discourse is pouring out from the feminists classes about men and the
effects about sexual identity and how the sexes donUt really exist. The
discourse is everywhere, even when people are not taking womenUs studies
courses. Then they take it into the media with them. There is this
creepy PC empty genteel rhetoric about sex that is so removed from
reality, okay? It is no wonder. It is coming out of the most bizarre
kind of eunuchUs ghetto.
In my work, I try to remain in touch with every day people,
constantly testing my theories against what I see as a live ordinary
people, on buses, in shopping malls, in the audiences of talk shows on
T.V. I am constantly trying to test my theories against the norm. You
have the post-structuralists influencing classes at Yale, saying there is
no norm. There is a norm and most of the world lives according to that
norm. Billions and billions of people in the world know what men are and
what women are, and they are happy to be men and women. They are happy
within traditional roles and a lot of my arguments with the feminist
establishment and academic feminists come from the fact that I regard
them as fiddling while Rome burns. These people are off in a little room
talking at each other and not realizing that no one pays any attention to
them, that they satisfy only each other, and their theories about sex are
garbage.
YJE: Which brings me to the Canon debate. What in your opinion makes a work of art great and suitable to put on a rating list?
CP: Arguments about course contents have been going on obviously
since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The word canon is usually
used only by people who are opposed to it. Professors have an obligation
to choose from the abundance of achievements of world cultures.
Professors have an obligation to choose the premiere work which is not
the result of some conspiracy by white heterosexual men sitting in a room
trying to promote the power of their own in-group. That is absolute
nonsense. The greatness of a work is defined by how much influence itUs
had over other work and other artists. ItUs artists who make the canon,
not critics.
I think it is crucial that college education be about the past, not
about the present. The fundamental error of a lot of educational reform
in the last twenty years has been a mad panic to be relevant. But
relevance in the classroom is created by the teacher in dealing with
great works of the past. The teachers should constantly be trying to tie
in that great work to the studentsU lives and things that are happening
now. That is the way you make relevance. There is no reason that young
peopleUs time should be taken up in the classroom to be teaching Toni
Morrison. For Heaven's sake, say, "Those of you interested in
African-American literature, here's a reading list. Go buy the book."
You do need guidance in reading extremely difficult works of the
remote past. The teacher is there to help you through the complex works
of the great past. I believe it enlightens the multiculturals.
In Sex, Art, and American Culture, I talk about a course called
"East and West" that I team taught with the artist Lilly Yeh. We were
searching for ways to present multicultural material not in ideological
or dogmatic fashion. I am completely immersed in the world of pop, so
the second volume Sexual Personae is all about popular culture.
I believe very strongly that some works are greater than others, and
that greatness has always been defined as something which attained a
universal or global impact. For example, the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth century classical music produced by European composers
that are revered in Japan. In no way are we saying that this is a
conspiracy by us to put that music forward.
Saul Bellow got into a lot of trouble by saying, "Where is the
Tolstoy of the Zulu's? If you could find him, I would be happy to read
him." People said that was a racist remark. He could have put it a
little more eloquently.
My reply is simply that interpretation relies upon the idea that
western culture is a complex combination of the Judeo-Christian tradition
and the Greco-Roman. These two traditions are in conflict and so we have
this terrible tension going on in our culture, particularly about sex and
aggression. Much of our artwork P the titanic achievements of
Michelangelo or Picasso or Rubens P is wrestling with the inner conflicts
of our tradition. So the greatness of western art is not due to western
myopia P it is due to the neuroticism thatUs built into the western
brain. So I am saying that there is no Tolstoy of the Zulus. There is
no other culture in the history of the world that has ever produced
gigantic complex novels like War and Peace or Wuthering Heights. It is
just one of the characteristics of western culture.
The thing that I want is an enlightened multiculturalism. I want
everyone to know the culture of the world. My plan is that comparative
religion is the best way to truly give an international perspective to
the young. Hinduism and Islam and Judeo-Christianity, African
traditional religions, and Shintoism and native American culture should
all be studied, because that is the best entree into a grasp of world
history.
Instruction at the college level should begin in the most remote
past and only barely touch the present. No teacher has any business
telling the young about the present: the young are the present and they
are making the future day by day. Every teacher, the moment that he or
she steps from the classroom, is already history.
YJE: What about movements like multiculturalism?
CP: What is post-colonial, what is that? It is the only area where
graduate students can get jobs. It is horrible the amount of time that
people are spending reading this crappy stuff when they should be
immersed in the great works.
I've written three books now that are best sellers. How was I able
to develop my prose style at the level that it is at so I can just use it
like a sword? From immersion in great works. Thank God when I was
trained in college my professors believed in their obligations to expose
us to the greatest art and the greatest music, the greatest paintings,
the greatest novels, the greatest thinkers, regardless of gender and
race, and that produced me.
So now Generation X is in a state of collapse. ItUs like sending
people to a gym and saying, ROh, weUre tired of those big heavy weights P
weUre going to give you these little weights. WeUll give you a lot of
interesting little weights.S There is no way you can ever obtain
champion status without dealing with the hard heavy weights.
YJE: In your works you often talk about the role and importance of
art in culture. What would you say to people who say that art like
ballet, opera, and museums, is no longer relevant to the general American
public?
CP: My argument in Sexual Personae and all my books is that the high
art tradition collapsed after modernism. Popular culture is the great
heir to the western past.
And so I love advertising. Advertising is an art form. Everyone
should take a course in mass media. Every student should be informed of
this now 200 year history of mass media, going back to the great
newspapers of the nineteenth century. Everyone should know how T.V. news
is shaped, manipulated and edited before you see it on the screen, the
intricate connection between advertising and the magazines, and how
reporters gather news. That is absolutely crucial.
But I do not believe that classroom time should be taken up studying
popular culture. Sure, itUs fine to write about it. IUve always
encouraged papers to be done on popular culture. In teaching my course
on RThe History of Images of Women,S I might do a little bit of the
images of Madonna at the end, but to have a whole course about Madonna is
a scam.
I think that teachers have to make the hard decisions in Humanities
Q what are the basic facts that one should know? Q and then I want
everyone to be teaching in that core. I am a great defender of the
classics. I believe there are very great works or art that must be
known. At the same time, I realize that that age is over and that after
modernism is the age of popular culture. Its great art forms are cinema
and rock and roll. I am a great lover of television, soap opera.
I hate serious novels. No important serious novels have been
written after World War II. I donUt care how many people have gotten
Nobel Prizes. To me the most important novel written after World War II
is Auntie Mamie and I am serious. The only serious literature after
World War II that I like at all is either decadent or it is comedic Q the
age of the serious novel is long gone and people who think theyUre
teaching through contemporary novels in their class, get out of here.
Instead, turn on the TV and the soap opera. I go to "The Young and the
Restless" to learn about contemporary mores. Or I listen to comedians
who know what is happening right now.
YJE: How do you reconcile your enthusiasm for advertising with the
traditional feminist claim that it objectifies women and fosters
unrealistic expectations?
CP: Again, I agree with Andy Warhol about advertising as art. I
never made any distinction in my mind between the paintings and the
sculptures, the pictures of the great treasures of the Louvre, and the
advertising that I saw. The imagery of woman, of glamorous or naked or
semi-naked women, seems no different to me than BotticelliUs RBirth of
VenusS or Delacroix nudes. It is not possible to have a degrading or
demeaning picture of a nude person. That is a puritanical
Judeo-Christian delusion of the nude body, and if you look at Hindu art
youUll see nude bodies on Hindu temples often in copulating positions of
threesomes and foursomes. And you will realize that we are sick. The
idea that a woman lying with her legs open Q a beaver shot Q is
degrading to her is the sickness of the West. In most world culture it
is a symbol of fertility, a symbol of power, and not of weakness.
We are dealing here with women who are so alienated from their own
bodies. Whose brains are being poisoned with this nonsense? Young
women, what are they being told? They are being told that their bodies
and the display of their bodies, is extremely degrading and theyUre being
objectified by it. This is one of the biggest canards in contemporary
feminism, like the idea that the male gaze turns you into an object,
makes you passive, and reduces your status.
All you have to do is shift that idea over to the gay male world and
you will see how stupid it is. In the gay male world there is a
tremendous iconography of beautiful young boys everywhere. Gorgeous
hunks lying so languidly in magazines and newspapers. Not one person in
the gay male world would ever believe that the beautiful boy is passive
and inert and objectified. Everyone knows that the older men are looking
up, up at this beautiful specimen, that his value is high, he is a god.
He is worshipped.
Young people are being trained to look around them at all the visual
pleasure, in graphic design and advertising. You are being taught
insanity, to resist, to hate, and to be afraid, to resent and to see this
conspiracy of degrading womenUs bodies.
In fact, the reason why women have been used to sell products is
that everyone wants to look at a beautiful woman. Placing a woman next
to a car is a sign of womenUs power, that you want to associate your
product with a womanUs beauty. It's not a sign of women's
commodification. These are crazed delusions fostered by afraid
individuals, word-centered people coming out of puritanical Protestant or
very religious Jewish traditions.
The ability to pick up pleasure in the visual seems to be beyond
those who are coming out of the Anglo-American Protestant traditions.
Puritanism hangs very, very heavy in America, especially in the Ivy
League schools which were founded in the seventeenth century.
What are we doing to young women? This form of brainwashing to
make them go against their own aesthetic impulses is a terrible thing to
do to young women. You want to respond with pleasure to a beautiful
image in an ad, but they say, "You can't, that's wrong, here's what you
must think."
YJE: What was your opinion on the controversy surrounding the
implications of PlayboyUs RWomen of the Ivy LeagueS feature (October
1995)?
CP: I havenUt seen it, but I support Playboy in all its
manifestations. I have gone out of my way to write for and to appear in
both Playboy and Penthouse, not of course in the nude form because I am
far too old for that. There is nothing wrong with women who have good
bodies posing for Playboy. If Playboy were kidnapping people to pose,
that would be different. But since it is consentual, it's fine with me.
The true feminism of the twenty-first century cannot be in
opposition to the menUs magazines. Everyone wants feminist theory to
interpret them as degrading to women, but that is not the way the men
look at it. The criticism is a ridiculous kind of projection by
professional white middle class women who I believe have a jealousy
factor. They want to say, RThose are bimbos, they're not important to
culture, we are the ones more important. How dare you men be interested
in these bimbos!S WomenUs sexual power is there whether professional
white women like it or not.
By the time professional women gain the position they want in the
world, they have begun to lose their sexual allure and feel very insecure
about this. This is the reality principle. We have to get over this, in
the gay male world as well. All this stuff about lookism Q Roh thatUs
terrible, we shouldnUt judge by looksS Q but itUs not just about women.
The gay male world is one of the most ruthless of them all. An aging gay
man is totally valueless, and people say, RWell, thatUs not right.S
Guess what? All the cultures in the history of the world have valued
youth and beauty. We want a culture where elders are also valued for
their wisdom, but we canUt go on denying that thereUs tremendous prestige
in every culture to youth and beauty and I think that is the way it
should be because theyUre transient principles. If someone has a
beautiful body and wants to show it, I applaud them.
YJE: So you would say that beauty is a physical, objective essence
rather than an attitude?
CP: All the talk that real beauty comes from within is a bunch of
malarkey. It's ridiculous. There are genuinely beautiful people. I am
coming out of the Hellenistic tradition, with conception of beauty like
Plato. Beauty is something sacred, a temporary thatUs gone very fast.
Very rarely do you see someone like Catherine Deneuve who is still
beautiful. Over time you can only stay beautiful if you have something
from within. People who are just physically beautiful on the outside
will cease being beautiful by the time theyUre thirty or so, but
nevertheless, I have adopted the gay male perspective on this: I believe
that enormous beauty is a great gift and I honor it wherever I see it. I
value youth and beauty, and I think that it is about time that the
word-obsessed neurotics from academia start realizing that most of the
world does too.
All these stupid technical feminist film critics want to grind all
of art down to things that have approved and moral messages. In fact,
life is more complex than that. It cannot be reduced to political
agendas. Life is bigger than politics.
1996 The Yale Journal of Ethics. All
rights reserved.