Free Women, Free Men
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Camille Paglia is the University Professor of Humanities and Media Studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. A regular contributor to Salon.com, she is the author of Glittering Images; Break, Blow, Burn; Vamps and Tramps; Sex, Art, and American Culture; and Sexual Personae.
"A compilation of Paglia's best, and most incendiary, previously published essays . . . At times infuriating, at times glittering, Paglia's prose is always biting and relentless" Huffington Post
"Fiercely erudite, freewheeling and sex-drenched . . . The Helen Vendler-meets-Patti Smith grad seminar you wanted but never quite got [. . . Paglia is] a fearless public intellectual and more necessary than ever" New York Times
"Paglia is a brilliant thinker on culture and human nature . . . Inspirational in its tone and its message" Helen Smith, The New Criterion
"Her work is always thought provoking . . . Relatable and enthralling" BUST
ALSO BY CAMILLE PAGLIA
Glittering Images:
A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars
Break, Blow, Burn:
Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World’s Best Poems
The Birds
Vamps & Tramps: New Essays
Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson
FREE WOMEN
FREE MEN
SEX • GENDER • FEMINISM
CAMILLE PAGLIA
Published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Compilation copyright © Camille Paglia, 2017
First published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House
Information on previous publications and illustration credits appears here
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 218 8
eISBN 978 1 78689 217 1
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art
2 The Venus of Willendorf
3 Nefertiti
4 Madonna: Animality and Artifice
5 Rape and Modern Sex War
6 Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf
7 The MIT Lecture: Crisis in the American Universities
8 The Strange Case of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill
9 The Nursery School Campus: The Corrupting of the Humanities in the U.S.
10 The Return of Carry Nation: Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin
11 A White Liberal Women’s Conference
12 Loose Canons: Review of Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls
13 Men’s Sports Vanishing
14 Coddling Won’t Elect Women, Toughening Will
15 Academic Feminists Must Begin to Fulfill Their Noble, Animating Ideal
16 Gridiron Feminism
17 The Modern Battle of the Sexes
18 American Gender Studies Today
19 The Cruel Mirror: Body Type and Body Image as Reflected in Art
20 The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery
21 Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform
22 No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class
23 The Stiletto Heel
24 Scholars in Bondage: Review of Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure; Staci Newmahr, Playing on the Edge; and Danielle J. Lindemann, Dominatrix
25 Gender Roles: Nature or Nurture
26 Are Men Obsolete?
27 Put the Sex Back in Sex Ed
28 It’s Time to Let Teenagers Drink Again
29 Cliquish, Tunnel-Vision Intolerance Afflicts Too Many Feminists: Interview with Deborah Coughlin, Feminist Times
30 Southern Women: Old Myths and New Frontiers
31 The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil
32 Why I Love The Real Housewives
33 What a Woman President Should Be Like
34 Feminist Trouble: Interview with Ella Whelan, Spiked Review
35 On Abortion
36 What’s in a Picture: Robert Mapplethorpe’s Portrait of Patti Smith for Horses
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Index
Previous Publication Information
Illustration Credits
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“Woman Warrior: Sexual Philosopher Camille Paglia Jousts with the Politically Correct” by Francesca Stanfill, cover story, New York magazine, March 4, 1991. Photograph taken by Harry Benson in the armor room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Inspired by early Rolling Stones album covers and Robert Mapplethorpe’s portrait of Patti Smith for Horses. Violet silk shirt alluded to Oscar Wilde’s Mauve Decade.
(Harry Benson/New York Media LLC)
“Woman Warrior” by Francesca Stanfill, New York magazine, March 4, 1991. Photograph by Harry Benson of Paglia on guard with her antique ivory-handled, silver-trimmed Knights Templar Masonic sword (purchased during adolescence at an upstate New York country store) on the Rocky steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The persona is defender of the arts.
(Courtesy of Harry Benson)
“Controversy: Street Fighting Woman. Academic brawler Camille Paglia takes on the campus establishment,” People, April 20, 1992. Asked by People for “one shocking picture,” Paglia struck a West Side Story pose with her Italian switchblade knife in the train tunnel at Swarthmore College.
(Mario Ruiz/Getty Images)
A rack of varied clothing was provided for a photo shoot with Steve Poole for the Daily Mail in London in January 1994. Paglia zeroed right in on a plush purple-velvet Moschino jacket adorned with gold buttons and cut in a piratical eighteenth-century style. It took a ship’s crew to get her in and out of those black thigh-high cavalier boots. (© Steven Poole)
Another photograph from the shoot with Steve Poole for the Daily Mail in London in January 1994. The clever crew turned a black shawl into a seaweed-streaming rock.
(© Steven Poole)
Drawings by John Callahan, published in 1993 in Willamette Week, an alternative newspaper in Portland, Oregon. Gift of the artist.
(© by John Callahan. Reprinted by permission.)
“America’s Most Influential Women: 200 Legends, Leaders, and Trailblazers,” Vanity Fair, November 1998. Vanity Fair invited Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Paglia to pose together for Annie Leibovitz. Friedan and Paglia agreed, but Steinem refused, so the magazine asked the great Robert Risko to do a group caricature. Headline: “REVOLUTIONARY.” Caption: “Friedan, Steinem, and Paglia are an influential triumvirate—just don’t put them in the same room.”
(Robert Risko)
“Attack of the 50-Foot Lesbian: Camille Paglia reigns as America’s most controversial, intellectual, and intimidating gay woman,” cover story, The Advocate, October 18, 1994.
(© 1994 Here Publishing. All rights reserved.)
“Paglia 101: Confessions of a Campus Radical,” cover story, Girlfriends, September 2000. Tagline: “Nobody is going to tell me I’m homophobic, okay? I will kick their ass!” Previously published in Girlfriends magazine. Reproduced with the permission of Diane Anderson-Minshall and Heather Findlay.
INTRODUCTION
History moves in cycles. The plague of political correctness and assaults on free speech that erupted in the 1980s and were beaten back in the 1990s have returned with a vengeance. In the United States, the universities as well as the mainstream media are cu
rrently patrolled by well-meaning but ruthless thought police, as dogmatic in their views as agents of the Spanish Inquisition. We are plunged once again into an ethical chaos where intolerance masquerades as tolerance and where individual liberty is crushed by the tyranny of the group.
The premier principles of this book are free thought and free speech—open, mobile, and unconstrained by either liberal or conservative ideology. The liberal versus conservative dichotomy, dating from the split between left and right following the French Revolution, is hopelessly outmoded for our far more complex era of expansive technology and global politics. A bitter polarization of liberal and conservative has become so extreme and strident in both the Americas and Europe that it sometimes resembles mental illness, severed from the common sense realities of everyday life.
Our understanding of sexuality, a paradigmatic theme and indeed obsession of modern culture, has been clouded by its current politicization. Sex and gender have been redefined by ill-informed academic theorists as superficial, fictive phenomena produced by oppressive social forces, disconnected from biology. This hallucination has sowed confusion among young people and seriously damaged feminism. A gender theory without reference to biology is absurd on its face. But as a proponent of dynamic free will, I certainly do not subscribe to a wholesale biological determinism. As I wrote on the very first page of Sexual Personae, “Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture.” Furthermore, my key idea is that art itself is a line drawn against nature.
My dissident brand of feminism is grounded in my own childhood experience as a fractious rebel against the suffocating conformism of the 1950s, when Americans, exhausted by two decades of economic instability and war, reverted to a Victorian cult of domesticity that limited young girls’ aspirations and confined them (in my jaundiced view) to a simpering, saccharine femininity. I have written elsewhere about my eccentric symbols of gender protest via transvestite Halloween costumes: Robin Hood at age five; the toreador from Carmen at six; a Roman soldier at seven; Napoleon at eight; Hamlet at nine. I took inspiration from wherever I could find it—from Classics Illustrated comic books and Courvoisier ads for Napoleon Cognac to the local church’s Stations of the Cross and my parents’ worn copy of Stories from the Great Metropolitan Operas.
But never in my passionate identification with heroic male figures was I encouraged by concerned but misguided adults to believe that I actually was a boy and that medical interventions could bring that hidden truth to life. On the contrary, by being forced to learn coping strategies for surviving in society, I was freed to develop my talents in other ways that have proved invaluable over time. When recently asked how I “identify” or describe myself, I replied, “Non-gendered entity.” However, except in very rare conditions of true hermaphroditism (a congenital disorder), the DNA of every cell of the human body is inflexibly coded as male or female from birth to death. While respect and legal protection are owed to anyone who for whatever reason seeks to shift positions along the intricate spectrum of sexual personae (the Latin word for theater masks), changing sex is scientifically impossible.
Social pressures on girls in the late 1950s and early 1960s were heavy and relentless. The cultural dictators were chirpy, all-American blondes like Doris Day and Debbie Reynolds, with their compulsive cheerfulness. At Girl Scout camp, I melted into the woods to escape the happy mass singing of Doris’s mega-hit, “Que Sera, Sera,” around the campfire. At school, teachers appreciated my academic efforts but were routinely exasperated by my blundering inability to fit into the sedate, deferential girl slot. After my role in some pushing and shoving in line, my fifth-grade teacher made me stay after school to look up the word “aggressive” in the dictionary—as if it were a heinous mortal sin for girls. My eighth-grade teacher irately pulled me out of class to demand that I sit at my desk without moving or shaking any part of my body—a then baffling shaming incident that has made me enduringly sympathetic to the plight of physically active boys imprisoned in a public school system dominated by female teachers.
My only escapes from the repressive homogeneity of that period were through pop culture (wide-screen Hollywood epics and rock ’n’ roll) and archaeology: I adored the monumentality and megalomania of Egyptian sculpture and architecture. When my parents could finally afford their first TV set (I was twelve), late-night movies became my gateway to the past. I discovered Katharine Hepburn, who electrified me. Her early films of the 1930s and ’40s, where she often played hard-charging career women or lordly socialites, were a revelation. I had never seen a woman so sharply definitive and assertive, so fearlessly abrasive. What I did not realize at the time, given the scarcity of information about pop culture (still dismissed as evanescent trash), was that I was channeling through Hepburn the epochal defiant spirit of first-wave feminism: her mother and aunt had been nationally prominent activists for suffrage and birth control, and Hepburn herself had campaigned as a small child at suffrage events. I drew up a detailed chart of Hepburn films and studiously checked off each time I was lucky enough to see one, with broadcast date.
In high school, I went wild over Amelia Earhart, about whose mysterious 1937 disappearance over the Pacific I read in a 1961 article in The Syracuse Herald-Journal. For three years, to the puzzlement of my schoolmates, I feverishly pursued a research project about Earhart—systematically plowing through old newspapers and magazines in the sooty basement of the downtown Syracuse library, writing hundreds of letters of inquiry, and visiting spots associated with Earhart on side detours from family car trips. I was given access to Earhart’s archives at Purdue University and had a private appointment at the National Air Museum in Washington, D.C., where a curator opened a vault to show me Earhart’s medals and awards. I visited the house where Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas, and the Opa Locka airfield in Florida where she left American soil on her last flight. I even briefly met her younger sister Muriel in a restaurant in Medford, Massachusetts.
Through Earhart, about whom I wrote a 77-page tenth-grade history project that I hoped to turn into a book, I learned first-hand about what would become my favorite period of feminism, the two decades just after American women won the right to vote in 1920. There were so many bold personalities and high achievers like Katharine Hepburn in every field—Dorothy Parker, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Thompson, Lillian Hellman, Clare Boothe Luce, Pearl S. Buck, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mary McCarthy, Babe Didrikson, Margaret Bourke-White. What was distinctive in those emancipated women—and here loom my later problems with second-wave feminism—was that they never indulged in reflex male-bashing: they accepted and admired the enormity of what men had accomplished and were simply demanding a fair chance to prove that women could match or surpass it. Their inspirational record of unapologetic ambition and plucky, resourceful self-reliance was the foundation for my later philosophy of equal opportunity feminism.
My Earhart project gradually receded after the thunderclap of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949), the English translation of which was given to me for my sixteenth birthday in 1963 by a Belgian woman colleague of my father. I was stunned by de Beauvoir’s imperious, authoritative tone and ambitious sweep through space and time. I began to dream of a book on the grand scale, a magnum opus that would incorporate all of my intense fixations, from archaeology to pop culture. That book, Sexual Personae, would take shape in the early 1970s as a study of androgyny for my doctoral dissertation at the Yale Graduate School. Revised and expanded, it was finally published in 1990 as a 700-page illustrated volume by Yale University Press, after rejections of the manuscript by seven publishers and five agents.
The vicious attacks on Sexual Personae by academic and establishment feminists (who in most cases had plainly not bothered to read it) will stand, I submit, as an indictment of the sorry process by which important political movements can undermine themselves through the blind insularity of their ruling coteries. Blow-by-blow chronicles of my public clashes with leading feminists a
nd their acolytes, including documentation of their outlandish libels against me and my work, can be found in my two essay collections, Sex, Art, and American Culture (1992) and Vamps & Tramps (1994). Gloria Steinem in particular surely stained her legacy by her baseless remarks.
Compiled in this new collection is a selection of my most representative articles, excerpts, lectures, and interviews on sex, gender, and feminism since the release of Sexual Personae over a quarter century ago. I believe that my heterodox ideas and conclusions continue to have manifest resonance for many readers because they are based not on a priori theory and received opinion but on wide-ranging scholarly research and close observation of actual social behavior in our time. What is demonstrated here is the consistency and continuity of my libertarian feminist positions, which predate the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 and her co-founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, universally considered the birth of second-wave feminism. In its July 8, 1963 issue, Newsweek magazine published as its lead letter to the editor my protest about the exclusion of women from the American space program:
Valentina Tereshkova has won the distinction of becoming the first woman to be launched into space 35 years to the day after Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Miss Earhart’s lifelong fight for equal opportunity for American women apparently still remains to be won.
CAMILLE A. PAGLIA
Syracuse, N.Y.
The letter was headlined “Cosmonautka and Aviatrix” and accompanied by a dramatic photo of Earhart in her leather flying jacket, captioned, “After Earhart, orbit.” I was 16, two years into my Earhart project and newly energized by Simone de Beauvoir, who was the ultimate and too rarely acknowledged source of Friedan’s principal ideas.
Cultural histories of the mid-twentieth century have vastly overstated the role of the second-wave women’s movement in the transformation and liberation of modern women. That tremendous change had already been in motion for other reasons from the early 1960s on. In the United States, my baby-boom generation was awakened and propelled forward by a great surge of optimism and idealism with the election in 1960 of the youthful, charismatic John F. Kennedy (for whom I had campaigned in Syracuse). Popular culture was an even more powerful force: the brash, body-based rhythms of rock ’n’ roll, with its dual roots in African-American blues and working-class country music, were our percussive anthem, breaking into general cultural consciousness when Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was blasted at high volume over the credits of The Blackboard Jungle in movie theaters in 1955.