Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  It was young women who were most jolted by Beatlemania. I have a reel-to-reel audio tape of a girls’ party at my house on the night the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. The noise level of our ecstatic response overwhelmed the microphone. That was the moment, nationwide, when American girls slew forever the decorous conventions of the 1950s. At their Shea Stadium concert the following year, the Beatles could not hear each other onstage and security guards covered their ears, so massive was the nonstop shrieking of girls exhilarated by their collective new freedom.

  Barbra Streisand has never received due credit for her pioneering role in shattering female convention and laying the groundwork for second-wave feminism. Emerging from bohemian nightclubs where her campy patter and vintage costumes were shaped by gay male sensibility, Streisand embodied a scrappy non-conformism and confrontational toughness that strikingly contrasted with the emotional depth and elegant beauty of her singing. Her uncompromising ethnicity was career-risking: she refused to bob her prominent Jewish nose or moderate her harsh Brooklyn accent. A frequent guest on TV shows of the early 1960s, she was catapulted to fame by the Broadway musical, Funny Girl, which landed her on the covers of Time and Life in 1964.

  As a huge Streisand devotee (I saw her onstage shortly before Funny Girl closed), I hailed her as a radical new woman who was smashing the genteel feminine code of the uber-WASP Doris Day–Debbie Reynolds regime. Entering Harpur College (the State University of New York at Binghamton) in the fall of 1964, I was amazed by the verve and audacity of the huge cadre of Jewish-American women students from metropolitan New York. They were politically progressive, mordantly funny, brutally blunt, and sexually free. Their unsparing realism often came from the harrowing experience of their grandparents’ generation during the Holocaust. Streisand’s rise from obscurity to stardom was a bellwether for a revolution stirring among American women well before the founding of NOW.

  Young British women were also riding the zeitgeist in Swinging Sixties London, as England recovered from its post-war economic slump. Throughout my college years, I viewed the scintillating London of music, movies, and fashion as my distant spiritual home. In Binghamton, I somehow dug up gender-bending knockoffs of Carnaby Street–Portobello Road style gear—flowing Tom Jones or paisley shirts; men’s chevron ties; flared, pin-striped hip-huggers; a sailor’s maroon pea coat with gold military buttons; zipped Beatles boots with Cuban heels. Harpur’s laid-back hippies, who affected a tattered, thrift-shop look, didn’t like it one bit but prudently kept their distance. When I got to graduate school in 1968, I foolishly kept it all going—even adding a purple suede vest and a psychedelic orange-and-green stained-glass pendant on a leather thong from Greenwich Village. Needless to say, the tweedy Yale professors weren’t thrilled.

  The vivacious young women of London were photographed by John D. Green for a 1967 large-format book, Birds of Britain. In his introduction, Anthony Haden-Guest called “the new British girl” a “shock genetic mutation” produced by “the London Scene” and crossing social classes, from salesgirl to debutante. She was the mercurial, coltish Julie Christie in Darling (1965) and the volatile, enigmatic Vanessa Redgrave in Blow-Up (1966). Among the 55 sparklingly kinetic British girls in Green’s book: Susannah York, Charlotte Rampling, Hayley Mills, Mary Quant, Jane Asher, Sarah Miles, Pattie Boyd, Cilla Black, Lulu, Dusty Springfield, and Marianne Faithfull.

  The British youthquake, with its flamboyant “unisex” trend in clothing and hair styles for both men and women, proves that second-wave feminism was only one strand in the ongoing gender transformations of the 1960s. The formidable Diana Rigg was already in her black leather cat suit and throwing karate chops as Emma Peel in the hit British TV series, The Avengers, in 1966. The first and most influential militant female persona of the period was probably Ursula Andress as the fierce conch-hunter Honey Ryder in the first James Bond film, Dr. No (1962), where she steps from the sea in a dazzling white bikini and with a knife strapped to her hip. (I borrowed her heraldic knife for the Amazonian cover photo of Vamps & Tramps.) That bewitching scene, with its mythic evocation of an armed goddess born from the waves, would inspire the enduringly iconic poster for a 1966 British film, One Million Years B.C., for which Raquel Welch as a cave woman in a ragged hide bikini spontaneously struck a combative, athletic pose. But the early hostility of second-wave feminism to the great sex symbols of film—indeed to all blatant eroticism in the entertainment industry—prevented those spectacular images from being incorporated into the history of women’s modern advance.

  Among my many quarrels with second-wave feminists was my enthusiastic admiration for the sexy “Bond girls” and Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, as well as for Francesco Scavullo’s glossy, glamorous, plunging-bodice covers for Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan magazine. (Feminist protestors, led by Kate Millett, staged a sit-in at Brown’s offices in 1970.) Similarly, the hugely popular Charlie’s Angels TV series (1976–81) was contemptuously dismissed as “jiggle” or “tits and ass” TV by feminist puritans. Hence my delight at the return of Charlie’s Angels after the triumph of pro-sex feminism in the 1990s: thanks to producer-actress Drew Barrymore, there have been two successful Charlie’s Angels films (2000 and 2003) and a TV series (2011).

  Betty Friedan, a tireless, outspoken advocate for women’s rights, was incontrovertibly the primary figure in the historic revival of organized feminist activism. But Betty Friedan did not create the formidable Germaine Greer in Australia, and she did not create me in the snow belt of upstate New York. I have repeatedly called Greer one of the emblematic women of the twentieth century. She remains the living person whom I most admire. Feminism would not have gone so wrong so fast had Greer retained the exuberant, slashingly satirical, all-conquering, and openly libidinous persona of her international debut after the publication of her first book, The Female Eunuch, in 1970. I have written and commented extensively about Greer, but there is room here for only one piece—my review of her 1995 study of women poets, Slip-Shod Sibyls.

  The present book opens with half of the highly controversial first chapter of Sexual Personae, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art.” Most feminists who fumed about it were usually reacting to out-of-context quotation of my signature one-liners (inspired by Oscar Wilde and innumerable Jewish comedians, including Joan Rivers). This chapter, with its dark overview of biology, is a protest against the omnipotence of nature and the outrage of gender. It is written from a trans-gender or should I say supragender point of view, like that of Tiresias, the invisible observer of sexual mores in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Chapter One is merely an overture, inspired by Wagner. The rest of the book is quite different in tone, with chapters inspired in whole or in part by Bach, Chopin, Brahms, Rimsky-Korsakov, Debussy, Puccini, Satie, and Delius, in addition to movie music by Max Steiner, Miklós Rózsa, and Bernard Herrmann. Real readers, as opposed to lockstep ideologues, appreciated the sudden emotional shift (as in Hollywood soundtracks) into Chapter Two, “The Birth of the Western Eye,” where art rescues humanity from the abyss of nature. Two excerpts are reprinted here: my diptych of a Stone Age statuette, the Venus of Willendorf, contrasted with the Egyptian bust of Queen Nefertiti. These passages are odes in the prose-poem style of the Oxford aesthete, Walter Pater, one of Wilde’s principal mentors.

  Sexual Personae was reasonably well-received by most reviewers. It was my piece on Madonna in The New York Times later in 1990 that made me instantly notorious. Background details of the circuitous genesis of this and my other articles in that inflammatory period can be found in “A Media History” in Sex, Art, and American Culture. In 2010, The New York Times featured this piece as one of its most significant and influential op-eds in the 40 years since it had invented that now standard form. What caused a storm was first, my open attack on the normally protected feminist establishment and second, my closing sally, “Madonna is the future of feminism,” which was widely ridiculed as preposterous. But that prophecy would come true i
n the rise and resounding victory of long-silenced pro-sex feminism in the 1990s. Furthermore, my cheeky use of slang, which was debated by the editorial board, broke long-standing rules of decorum at The New York Times and opened the way for later writers like Maureen Dowd. Finally, the piece started a stampede for op-eds among humanities professors, who had previously considered writing for newspapers beneath their dignity. It was mainly historians, economists, and political scientists who had been doing op-eds before.

  Six weeks later, New York Newsday published my op-ed on date rape, which remains the most controversial thing I have ever written. Syndicated in regional newspapers from coast to coast in haphazard truncated form, it caused a huge backlash. There was a coordinated campaign, evidently emanating from feminist groups in the Midwest, to harass the president of my university with demands for my firing. That article, often reprinted in freshman-composition course packs at state universities, caused me endless trouble throughout the 1990s. It led to picketing and protests at my outside campus lectures and to my own walk-offs (to avoid fisticuffs) from Austrian and British TV talk shows and even from the stage of Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. My lecture for the latter 1995 event, “The Modern Battle of the Sexes,” was commissioned by the BBC and is reprinted here.

  I still stand by every word of my date-rape manifesto. Women infantilize themselves when they cede responsibility for sexual encounters to men or to after-the-fact grievance committees, parental proxies unworthy of true feminists. My baby-boom generation demanded and won an end to the in loco parentis parietal rules, and it is tragic indeed how so many of today’s young women seem to long for a return of those hovering paternalistic safeguards. As a career college teacher, I want our coddling, authoritarian universities to end all involvement with or surveillance of students’ social lives and personal interactions, verbal or otherwise. If a real crime is committed, it should be reported to the police. Otherwise, college administrations should mind their own business and focus on facilitating and funding education in the classroom.

  Many pieces in this book critique and lampoon prominent feminists, on campus and off. (My first scholarly publication, written in grad school, was “Lord Hervey and Pope,” which appeared in Eighteenth Century Studies in 1973: Alexander Pope’s scathing mock-epics, especially The Dunciad, remain a heavy influence.) My long 1991 review-essay for Arion, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” was primarily a hostile dissection of post-structuralism, which has in my view distorted gender studies and effectively destroyed the humanities. That was still my theme more than 20 years later in “Scholars in Bondage,” my in-depth 2013 review for The Chronicle of Higher Education of three flawed new books by women academics on bondage and domination. Notable is my use of “corporate” in the Arion title: I was one of the few voices at the time denouncing the escalating corporatization of American universities, which was being exploited by careerist academics masquerading as leftists while obscenely driving up their own star salaries on the competitive national market. Similarly, in my 1992 essay, “The Nursery School Campus,” for The Times Literary Supplement, I fired a prophetic warning shot about the takeover of American universities by an expanding class of intrusive administrators, leading to today’s disastrous loss of faculty power.

  Articles here where I took a contrarian position against the feminist establishment include my denial that Anita Hill was a feminist heroine; my attack on Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin as Stalinist fanatics; and my defense of unconstrained reproductive rights while also acknowledging the ethical superiority of the pro-life argument in the abortion debate. Although I voted twice for Bill Clinton, I appear to be the only feminist who publicly condemned him for his abusive treatment of Monica Lewinsky and who protested the casuistry of feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem in hypocritically refusing for partisan reasons to apply basic sexual harassment rules to this deplorable case.

  A recurrent theme in these pieces, as in my dissection of gender propaganda in the United Nations documents for its 1996 Conference on Women in Beijing, is the privileged bourgeois assumptions, self-preoccupied and status-conscious, in too much feminist thinking. (Attention to this long-standing problem has finally come to the fore as “intersectionality.”) In the 1990s, when most other feminists were focused on policy matters, I was virtually alone in pressing the issue of the first woman president, for whom I insisted that military history rather than gender studies was the proper college training. I steadily protested the anti-male bias of second-wave feminism and took up the cudgels to defend men’s wrestling and football (as in my sports credo, “Gridiron Feminism”).

  Female body image in art and popular culture is addressed in my lecture, “The Cruel Mirror,” as well as in pieces on plastic surgery and the stiletto high heel. My celebration of Bravo TV’s Real Housewives series is predictably oppositional: Gloria Steinem repeatedly criticized and dismissed the show. My 2014 University of Mississippi lecture on Southern women, published here for the first time, examines three female stereotypes: the old mountain woman, the mammy, and the Southern belle. In op-eds written for Time, I call for fertility issues to be addressed in school sex education; for an end to young women’s frightening naïveté about sex crime; and for a repeal of the unjust Age-21 law regulating alcohol sales, which I connect to the sudden date-rape crisis of the 1980s, when riotous fraternity keg parties filled the social gap. My interviews with Deborah Coughlin for Feminist Times and Ella Whelan for Spiked Review highlight the ongoing common concerns of British and American feminism.

  Ending the book is my essay on Robert Mapplethorpe’s brilliant, half-transvestite portrait of Patti Smith for the album cover of Horses (1975), which I hung like a sacred icon on my wall at my first teaching job at Bennington College. Mutual friends who frequented CBGB’s music club on New York’s Bowery had recognized the cultural parallels between Smith and me and tried to bring us together. (We were briefly introduced in passing one afternoon when I was at the deserted CBGB’s for a later performance by the proto-punk band Television, but it would have made no impression on her, given that I was unpublished and unknown.) I deeply admire Smith’s respect for great male artists as well as her rejection of feminist rancor toward men. In a 2007 interview with Bust magazine, Smith said, “I never was really concerned with the idea of feminism. As a humanistic person, I’m interested in the human condition. I’m interested in men’s rights just as much as women’s rights. … I’ve never limited myself as an artist or as a human being to a genderized position.”

  The Mapplethorpe photo was a major inspiration for my 1991 New York magazine cover photo (reproduced here), taken in the armor room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Francesca Stanfill’s very discerning profile: I am doing my glowering best to imitate my idol, Keith Richards, the original model for Smith’s raffish 1970s rock-star hair cut. Also reproduced here, along with the covers of two gay magazines, are several examples of the theatrical scenarios I devised for routine photo shoots requested by magazines and newspapers to illustrate interviews or profiles. I sometimes brought props (whip, chains, sword, switchblade knife) to visually transmit my philosophy of street-smart Amazon feminism directly to the public, bypassing whatever untruths might be planted in the articles themselves by biased journalists or editors.

  Like Mapplethorpe and unlike most feminists, I viewed fashion photography as a major modern art form. My longtime favorite photographers were Richard Avedon, David Bailey, and Helmut Newton, each of whom had a unique flair for capturing the essence of personality via moments of random choreography. Another inspiration for my outré photo shoots was David Bowie’s stunning sexual personae during his Ziggy Stardust period of the early 1970s. (I regret there is no space to reprint my catalog essay, “Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution,” commissioned by the Victoria & Albert Museum for its 2013 exhibit of Bowie costumes in London.) It must be stressed that my flamboyant media presence lasted scarcely four years and was boosted by the official bo
ok tours for three bestsellers in a row (1991–94). After that, like the Roman general Cincinnatus returning to his plow, I simply resumed my cherished seclusion as a teacher and writer. As I often say, I’m just a schoolmarm!

  The title of this book exalts freedom as an indispensable condition for the incubation and flourishing of individualism. My libertarian feminism, which takes the best from both liberalism and conservatism but is decidedly neither, places freedom of thought and speech above all ideology. I am an intellectual first and a feminist second—an ethical commitment to truth-seeking that I urge aspiring young writers and artists to adopt. The Free Speech Movement, led by a fiery Italian-American, Mario Savio, erupted at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, the year I entered college. It was a cardinal moment for my generation. The anti-establishment stance of the Free Speech Movement represented the authentic populist revolution of the 1960s, which resisted encroachments of authority by a repressive elite. How is it possible that today’s academic left has supported rather than protested campus speech codes as well as the grotesque surveillance and over-regulation of student life? American colleges have abandoned their educational mission and become government colonies, ruled by officious bureaucrats enforcing federal dictates. This despotic imperialism has no place in a modern democracy.