To understand rape, you must study the past. There never was and never will be sexual harmony. Every woman must take personal responsibility for her sexuality, which is nature’s red flame. She must be prudent and cautious about where she goes and with whom. When she makes a mistake, she must accept the consequences and, through self-criticism, resolve never to make that mistake again. Running to Mommy and Daddy on the campus grievance committee is unworthy of strong women. Posting lists of guilty men in the toilet is cowardly, infantile stuff.
The Italian philosophy of life espouses high-energy confrontation. A male student makes a vulgar remark about your breasts? Don’t slink off to whimper and simper with the campus shrinking violets. Deal with it. On the spot. Say, “Shut up, you jerk! And crawl back to the barnyard where you belong!” In general, women who project this take-charge attitude toward life get harassed less often. I see too many dopey, immature, self-pitying women walking around like melting sticks of butter. It’s the Yvette Mimieux syndrome: make me happy. And listen to me weep when I’m not.
The date-rape debate is already smothering in propaganda churned out by the expensive Northeastern colleges and universities, with their overconcentration of boring, uptight academic feminists and spoiled, affluent students. Beware of the deep manipulativeness of rich students who were neglected by their parents. They love to turn the campus into hysterical psychodramas of sexual transgression, followed by assertions of parental authority and concern. And don’t look for sexual enlightenment from academe, which spews out mountains of books but never looks at life directly.
As a fan of football and rock music, I see in the simple, swaggering masculinity of the jock and in the noisy posturing of the heavy-metal guitarist certain fundamental, unchanging truths about sex. Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history. Women must reorient themselves toward the elemental powers of sex, which can strengthen or destroy.
The only solution to date rape is female self-awareness and self-control. A woman’s number one line of defense is herself. When a real rape occurs, she should report it to the police. Complaining to college committees because the courts “take too long” is ridiculous. College administrations are not a branch of the judiciary. They are not equipped or trained for legal inquiry. Colleges must alert incoming students to the problems and dangers of adulthood. Then colleges must stand back and get out of the sex game.
6
JUNK BONDS AND CORPORATE RAIDERS: ACADEME IN THE HOUR OF THE WOLF
Women’s studies is institutionalized sexism. It too must go. Gender studies is no alternative: “gender” is now a biased, prudish code word for social constructionism. Sexology is an old and distinguished field. As sex studies, frankly admitting it is sex we are tirelessly interested in, it would take in the hundred-year history of international commentary on sex; it would make science its keystone; and it would allow both men and women as well as heterosexuals and homosexuals to work together in the fruitful dialogue of dislike, disagreement, and debate, the tension, confrontation, and dialectic that lead to truth. Women’s studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink. It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women. Sunk in a cocoon of smug complacency, they are blind to their own clichéd Rousseauist ideology. Feminists are always boasting of their “diversity” and pluralism. This is like white Protestants, in the nineteenth and pre-Sixties twentieth centuries when they controlled American politics, finance, and academe, claiming diversity on the basis of their dozens of denominations. But blacks, Jews, and Italian Catholics, standing on the outside, could clearly see the monolithic homogeneity that the WASP insiders were blissfully, arrogantly unaware of. If any field ever deserved a punishing Foucauldian analysis, it’s women’s studies, which is a prisoner of its own futile, grinding, self-created discourse. Women’s studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel, and malarkey. Pioneering work in sex studies will come only from men and women conservatively trained in high-level intellectual history.
[Arion, Spring 1991, excerpt]
American feminism’s nosedive began when Kate Millett, that imploding beanbag of poisonous self-pity, declared Freud a sexist. Trying to build a sex theory without studying Freud, women have made nothing but mud pies. In Great Britain and France, feminists did not make this silly mistake, but unfortunately their understanding of Freud has been tainted by the swindling Lacan. Now the missing but indispensable Freud is being smuggled back into America by the Lacan feminists, with their paralyzing puritanism. It’s all ass-backwards. Just read Freud, for pity’s sake, and forget Lacan. It’s outrageous that women undergraduates are being made to read Lacan who haven’t read Freud and therefore have no idea what Lacan is doing. Freud is one of the major thinkers in world history. One reads him not for his conclusions, which were always tentative and in process, but for the bold play of his speculative intelligence. He shows you how to conceptualize, how to frame long, overarching arguments, how to verbalize ambiguous, nonverbal psychic phenomena. Reading him, you feel new tracks being cut in your brain. Cheap gibes about Freud, epidemic in women’s studies, are a symptom of emotional juvenility. American feminists, sniveling about Freud without reading him, have sentenced themselves and their work to mediocrity and irrelevance.
Simone de Beauvoir’s brilliant, imperious The Second Sex, now 40 years old, is the only thing undergraduate sex studies needs. Add Freud to de Beauvoir, and you have intellectual training at its best. The later French women choking the current syllabus don’t come up to Simone de Beauvoir’s anklebones: that damp sob sister, Hélène Cixous, with her diarrhea prose, or Luce Irigaray, the pompous lapdog of Parisian café despots doing her grim, sledgehammer elephant walk through small points. American feminism is awash with soupy Campbellism: schlockmeisters like Marija Gimbutas, the Pollyanna of poppycock, with her Mommy goddess tales conveniently exalting her Lithuanian ancestors into world-class saintly pacifists. The chirpy warblers Gilbert-Gubar, those unlearned, unreadable bores, with their garbled, rumbling, hollow, rolling-trashcan style. Carolyn Heilbrun, Mrs. Fifties Tea Table, who spent her academic time, while my generation was breaking its head against social and sexual convention, spinning daydreams about a WASP persona, Amanda Cross, and who spoke out only when it was safe to do so. Heilbrun’s late self-packaging as a feminist is a triumph of American commerce. The gauzy, ethnicity-evading style of her dazzlingly research-free books is the height of wishful, reactionary gentility. Women’s studies is a jumble of vulgarians, bunglers, whiners, French faddicts, apparatchiks, doughface party-liners, pie-in-the-sky utopianists, and bullying, sanctimonious sermonizers. Reasonable, moderate feminists hang back and, like good Germans, keep silent in the face of fascism. For fifteen years, the established women academics irresponsibly let women’s studies spread uncritiqued and unchecked (I call this period “While Vendler Slept”). Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not by the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.
7
THE MIT LECTURE: CRISIS IN THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES
Thank you, Professor Manning, for that most gracious introduction. And may I say what a pleasure it is to be here, a mere stone’s throw from Harvard.
I address you tonight after several sex changes and a great deal of ambiguity over sexual orientation over twenty-five years. I am the Sixties come back to haunt the present.
Now, speaking here at MIT confronted me with a dilemma. I asked myself, should I try to act like a lady? I can do it. It’s hard, it takes a lot out of me,
I can do it for a few hours. But then I thought, Naw. These people, both my friends and my enemies who are here, aren’t coming to see me act like a lady. So I thought I’d just be myself—which is, you know, abrasive, strident, and obnoxious. So then you all can go outside and say, “What a bitch!”
[Excerpt from transcript of lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, September 19, 1991. Introduction by Kenneth Manning, Professor of the History of Science]
Now, the reason I’m getting so much attention: I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re in a time where there’s a kind of impasse in contemporary thinking. And what I represent is independent thought. What I represent is the essence of the Sixties, which is free thought and free speech. And a lot of people don’t like it. A lot of people who are well-meaning on both sides of the political spectrum want to shut down free speech. And my mission is to be absolutely as painful as possible in every situation.
So I’ve been attacking what I regard as the ideology of date rape. At the same time as I consider rape an outrage, I consider the propaganda and hysteria about date rape equally outrageous from the Sixties point of view, utterly reactionary from a Sixties point of view. And I will continue to attack it. And I will continue to attack the well-meaning people who think they’re protecting women and in fact are infantilizing them. …
One of the main reasons that I am so angry is that last year at the University of Pennsylvania I went to a lecture—and I’m going to start identifying her. I haven’t for a year, but I just spilled the beans to a Cornell magazine, so I might as well keep doing it. It was Diana Fuss of Princeton, a very prominent feminist theorist. She seems to be a very nice woman. This is the pity of it! She was such a nice woman. I had never heard of her, I didn’t know her. I went to this lecture and I thought, “This is awful, what is happening here!” A lecture hall filled with young women from the University of Pennsylvania, okay, and this Diana Fuss, this really nice, very American kind of a woman—we’re not talking, like, cosmopolitan here, and I mean cosmopolitan with a small c!—what she did was show a series of slides that she had made of contemporary ads and pictorials from Harper’s Bazaar and so on.
Let me tell the full story of what happened that night. Now, normally if you’re in a boring lecture, you can, like, tune out. You know, you can plan your meals, do your laundry in your head, and things like that, okay? In this case, it was torture to me, because she was showing these gorgeous pictures up on the screen, beautiful pictures that were stimulating the mind, stimulating the imagination, you understand? And at the same time she was trashing these pictures with this horrible Lacan, labyrinthine thing. So I was just out of my—I was out of control. People turned around and said “Shh!” to me. I was writhing in my seat [imitates electrocution-like spasms]. It was awful. Let me give you an example. There was a Revlon ad of a woman in a blue pool of water, and she was beautifully made up, and there was obviously a reflector being used to shine the sunlight especially intensely on her face. This was a beautiful ad. And Diana Fuss was going, “Decapitation—mutilation.”
Then there was a beautiful picture from Harper’s Bazaar, I think, of a black woman wearing a crimson turtleneck. But instead of the collar turned over, you know, it was up like this, around the chin. It was very beautiful. It was like a flower. And she was wearing aviator glasses that I recognized, from the 1930s! Now Diana Fuss said, “She’s blinded.” I would have said, “She has mystic vision.” Anyway, with the turtleneck, what do you think? “Strangulation, bondage!” It went on like this, picture after picture after picture. I thought, “This is psychotic.” Such radical misinterpretation of reality is psychotic. But it’s a whole system. Psychosis is a system. People within that system feel it’s very rational.
Now, what I hated about this was you had two hundred young women, who didn’t understand a word of what she was saying—it was all that Lacan gibberish—and they’re all going, “Ohhh, wow! The woman from Princeton—a big woman from Princeton. She’s so brilliant!” And I thought, “This is evil.” Diana Fuss is not evil. She’s a nice woman. But if what you’re doing is evil, I’m sorry, it has to stop. This is perverted. It really is perverted. When you destroy young people’s ability to take pleasure in beauty, you are a pervert! So I stood up, I was very agitated—and she was such a good sport. I mean, here was this maniac she never heard of, my book had just come out, and I was waving my arms around. I said I didn’t mean to condemn her, because I understood that what she was doing was the result of ten years of feminists doing this. But nevertheless, I asked, why is it, why is it that feminists have so much trouble dealing with beauty and pleasure, I said, to which gay men have made such outstanding cultural contributions? Why—if gay men can respond? This is why I get along so well with gay men, and I don’t get along with lesbian feminists. This is why my sexuality is a complete neuter! I don’t fit in anywhere! I’m like this wandering being, the Ancient Mariner—it’s just awful.
So anyway, afterwards I went down to speak to Diana Fuss because I wanted to find out how much she knows about art, because she’s a product of English departments. And I spoke to her a little bit, and I could see she knew nothing about art. And I also could tell she knew nothing about popular culture. Now you see the problem here. You cannot just suddenly open a magazine and look at a picture of a nude woman and then free associate, using Lacan. You cannot do that! Because fashion magazines are part of the history of art. These are great photographers, great stylists—and gay men have made enormous contributions to fashion photography. Anyway, I made a huge statement that night—the whole audience gasped. I went, “The history of fashion photography from 1950 to 1990 is one of the great moments in the history of art!” And everyone went, “How can you say that?” Because obviously fashion is an oppression of women.
And beauty, according to, um, Miss, um, Naomi Wolf, is a heterosexist conspiracy by men in a room to keep feminism back—and all that crap that’s going on. I call her, by the way, “Little Miss Pravda.” She and I are head-to-head on MTV this week, in case you want to know! But I won’t appear with her. Oprah’s tried to get me on with her: I won’t go on with her. A talk show in Italy wanted to fly me over to appear with her. No. I always say, “Would Caruso appear with Tiny Tim?” If you want to see what’s wrong with Ivy League education, look at The Beauty Myth, that book by Naomi Wolf. This is a woman who graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a Rhodes scholar, and cannot write a coherent paragraph. This is a woman who cannot do historical analysis, and she is a Rhodes scholar? If you want to see the damage done to intelligent women today in the Ivy League, look at that book. It’s a scandal. Naomi Wolf is an intelligent woman. She has been ill-served by her education. But if you read Lacan, this is the result. Your brain turns to pudding! She has a case to make. She cannot make it. She’s full of paranoid fantasies about the world. Her education was completely removed from reality.
Now, I want to totally reform education, so that we get really first-rate, top-level intellectual work by women. We’re not going to get it. There’s a lost generation of women coming out of these women’s studies programs—a lost generation. If you spend your whole time reading Gilbert-Gubar, Hélène Cixous, and all the rest of that French rot—thank God, I didn’t have that. Thank God, I had only men and Simone de Beauvoir—and Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter. There were great women writers as well as great women scholars. I held myself to the highest standards. I didn’t say, we’re going to make new standards, women’s standards, and give us women’s awards, the women’s sweepstakes, and all that stuff. No one takes women’s work seriously right now. Do you think that men take it seriously? Do you think anyone reads Gilbert-Gubar? I mean, who reads Gilbert-Gubar? or Carolyn Heilbrun, that mediocre, genteel crap, coming from a woman who’s Jewish and who is still writing in a genteel style. This is feminism? This is feminism? This is third-rate, tenth-rate stuff. It’s appalling that our young women are being assigned to read things like Lacan when they’re sophomores and
haven’t read Freud. What good does it do to read Lacan if you haven’t read Freud? All of Lacan is just a commentary on Freud. This is ridiculous. It’s a horrible situation. We need massive reform, at every level.
Now back to my little survey here. So by the time the women’s movement broke forth in the late 1960s, it was practically impossible for me to be reconciled with my “sisters.” And there were, like, screaming fights. The big one was about the Rolling Stones. Boy, I was bounced fast, right out of the movement. And I had this huge argument. Because I said you cannot apply a political agenda to art. When it comes to art, we have to make other distinctions. We had this huge fight about the song “Under My Thumb.” I said it was a great song, not only a great song but I said it was a work of art. And these feminists of the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band went into a rage, surrounded me, practically spat in my face, literally my back was to the wall. They’re screaming in my face: “Art? Art? Nothing that demeans women can be art!” There it is. There it is! Right from the start. The fascism of the contemporary women’s movement.
Feminism is 200 years old. Ever since Mary Wollstone-craft wrote that manifesto in 1792. It’s 200 years old. It’s had many phases. We can criticize the present phase without necessarily criticizing feminism. I want to save feminism from the feminists. What I identify with is the prewar feminism of Amelia Earhart, of Katharine Hepburn—who had an enormous impact on me—that period of women where you had independence, self-reliance, personal responsibility, and not blaming other people for your problems. I want to bring that back. And my life has been a good example of it. Because my career was a disaster, but I did not blame it on anyone. I took personal responsibility for my own work. If I could not be published in my own lifetime, I would leave it beyond the grave, as Emily Dickinson did, and torture people in the next life!
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