[The Times Literary Supplement (London), May 22, 1992]
America’s current intellectual crisis originates in the tragic loss of the boldest and most innovative members of the 1960s generation. Drugs may have expanded the mind, but they arrested its long-term productivity, whose promise was glimpsed in the so-called psychedelic phase of rock music.
The students most affected by the Sixties did not as a rule enter the professions, whose stultifying rules for advancement have remained unchanged for fifty years. Instead, they surrendered their places to less talented contemporaries, careerists in the dull, timid Fifties style.
Nowhere was this truer than in academia. The effect upon American universities of the student rebellions was fleeting. Genuine radicals did not go on to graduate school. If they did, they soon dropped out, or were later defeated by the faculty recruitment and promotion process, which rewards conformism and sycophancy. The universities were abandoned to the time-servers and mercenaries who now hold many of the senior positions there. Ideas had been relegated to the universities, but the universities belonged to the drudges.
There is a widespread notion that these people are dangerous leftists, “tenured radicals” in Roger Kimball’s phrase, who have invaded the American establishment with subversive ideas. In fact, they are not radicals at all. Authentic leftism is nowhere to be seen in our major universities. The multiculturalists and the politically correct on the subjects of race, class, and gender actually represent a continuation of the genteel tradition of respectability and conformity. They have institutionalized American niceness, which seeks, above all, not to offend and must therefore pretend not to notice any differences or distinctions among people or cultures.
The politically correct professors, with their hostility to the “canon” of great European writers and artists, have done serious damage to the quality of undergraduate education at the best American colleges and universities. Yet they are people without deep beliefs. Real radicals stand for something and risk something; these academics are very pampered fat cats who have never stood on principle at any point in their careers. Nothing has happened to them in their lives. They never went to war; they were never out of work or broke. They have no experience or knowledge of anything outside the university, least of all working-class life. Their politics are a trendy tissue of sentimental fantasy and unsupported verbal categories. Guilt over their own privilege has frozen their political discourse into a simplistic world melodrama of privilege versus deprivation.
Intellectual debate in the humanities has also suffered because of the narrowness of training of those who emerged from the overdepartmentalized and overspecialized universities of the post-war period. The New Criticism, casting off the old historicism of German philology, produced a generation of academics trained to think of literature as largely detached from historical context. This was ideal breeding ground for French theory, a Saussurean paradigm dating from the 1940s and ’50s that was already long passé when American academics got hold of it in the early 1970s. French theory, far from being a symbol of the 1960s, was on the contrary a useful defensive strategy for well-positioned, pedantic professors actively resisting the ethnic and cultural revolution of that subversive decade. Foucault, a glib game-player who took very little research a very long way, was especially attractive to literary academics in search of a shortcut to understanding world history, anthropology, and political economy.
The 1960s failed, I believe, partly because of unclear thinking about institutions, which it portrayed in dark, conspiratorial, Kafkaesque terms. The positive role of institutions in economically complex societies was neglected. The vast capitalist distribution network is so efficient in America that it is invisible to our affluent, middle-class humanists. Capitalism’s contribution to the emergence of modern individualism, and therefore feminism, has been blindly suppressed. This snide ahistoricism is the norm these days in women’s studies programs and chichi, Foucault-afflicted literature departments. Leftists have damaged their own cause, with whose basic principles I as a 1960s libertarian generally agree, by their indifference to fact, their carelessness and sloth, their unforgivable lack of professionalism as scholars. The Sixties world-view, which integrated both nature and culture, has degenerated into clamorous, competitive special-interest groups.
The universities led the way by creating a ghetto of black studies, which begat women’s studies, which in turn begat gay studies. Not one of these makeshift, would-be disciplines has shown itself capable of re-creating the broad humane picture of Sixties thought. Each has simply made up its own rules and fostered its own selfish clientele, who have created a closed system in which scholarship is inseparable from politics. It is, indeed, questionable whether or not the best interests of blacks, women, and gays have been served by these political fiefdoms. The evidence about women’s studies suggests the opposite: that these programs have hatched the new thought police of political correctness. No conservative presently in or out of government has the power of intimidation wielded by these ruthless forces. The silencing of minority opinion has been systematic in faculty recruitment and promotion. The winners of that rat race seem genuinely baffled by such charges, since, of course, their conventional, fashionable opinions have never been stifled.
While lecturing at major American universities this year, I have come into direct conflict with the politically correct establishment. At Harvard and elsewhere I was boycotted by the feminist faculty, and at several colleges leaflets were distributed, inaccurately denouncing me as a voice of the far right. Following my lecture at Brown, I was screamed at by soft, inexperienced, but seethingly neurotic middle-class white girls, whose feminist party-line views on rape I have rejected in my writings. Rational discourse is not possible in an atmosphere of such mob derangement.
Sociologically, the roots of the campus crisis can be found in the rapid expansion of the college-going population in America in the decades following the Second World War. After the “baby-boomers,” the post-war demographic bulge, passed through, colleges were forced to retrench, and they turned to aggressive marketing strategies to maintain enrollment. As costs continued to rise, they were locked into a strictly commercial relationship with parents. Intellectual matters soon took a backseat to the main issue: providing a “nice time” for students with paying parents.
By the early 1970s, American universities had become top-heavy with full-time administrators who took to speaking of the campus as a “community,” which, faculty soon discovered, was governed by invisible codes of acceptable speech, opinions, and behavior. In the past fifteen years, some of these administrators, especially Student Life deans and the freshmen orientation staff, have forged a disquieting alliance with women’s studies programs, and are indoctrinating their charges with the latest politically correct attitudes on dating, sexual preference, and so on. Many of the students, neglected by their prosperous, professional parents, are pathetically grateful for these attentions. Such coddling has led, in my view, to the outrageous speech codes which are designed to shield students from the realities of life. The campus is now not an arena of ideas but a nursery school where adulthood can be indefinitely postponed. Faculty who are committed to the great principle of free speech are therefore at war with paternalistic administrators in league with misguided parents.
In the summer-camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about their business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new huma
nities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static, and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.
Quieter, more traditional academics were outmaneuvered by the conference crowd, and scholarship was the victim. The humanities centers are now controlled by small, amoral cadres that are intricately intertwined with each other nationally by cronyism, favoritism, patronage and collusion. It is essential for American intellectual life that they be brought under scrutiny. And, indeed, that is beginning to happen: in April, a prominent woman scholar filed a lawsuit against the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for tolerating an internal putsch by a cabal of politically correct faculty members with close ties to the cultural studies center at Harvard University.
The solution to the present dilemma is for academic liberals to speak out against the rampant corruption of their profession. The reform of education is too often being left to the neoconservatives these days. My own proposals for reform include the abolition of all literary conferences and the replacement of women’s studies with sex studies, based on the rigorous study of world history, anthropology, psychology, and science. Today, in politically correct America, questions of quality, learning, and intellectual distinction are out of style.
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THE RETURN OF CARRY NATION: CATHARINE MACKINNON AND ANDREA DWORKIN
I am a pornographer. From earliest childhood, I saw sex suffusing the world. I felt the rhythms of nature and the aggressive energies of animal life. Art objects, in both museum and church, seemed to blaze with sensual beauty. The authority figures of church, school, and family denied or suppressed what I saw, but like Madonna, I kept to my pagan vision. I belong to the Sixties generation that tried and failed to shatter all sexual norms and taboos. In my book, Sexual Personae, I injected lewdness, voyeurism, homoeroticism and sadomasochism into the entire Western high-art tradition.
Because I am a pornographer, I am at war with Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. These obsessed, moralistic women, feminism’s oddest odd couple, are Carry Nation reborn. They were co-authors of the Minneapolis and Indianapolis ordinances against pornography that were declared unconstitutional. They have produced, individually and in collaboration, an enormous amount of material ranging from tortured autobiographical confessions to legal case histories and academic Marxist critiques.
[Playboy, October 1992]
MacKinnon was among the first to argue for the establishment of sexual harassment as a legal category. But her positive contributions to women’s issues must be weighed against the responsibility she bears for fomenting the crazed sexual hysteria that now grips American feminism. Date rape has swelled into a catastrophic cosmic event, like an asteroid threatening the earth in a Fifties science-fiction film. Anita Hill, a competent but priggish, self-interested yuppie, has been canonized as a virgin martyr ruined by the depraved emperor—who never laid a hand on her.
MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state-controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker, cultural historian, or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shockingly small. She has the dull instincts and tastes of a bureaucrat. It’s all work and no play in MacKinnon Land. Literature, art, music, film, television—nothing intrudes on MacKinnon’s consciousness unless it has been filtered through feminism, which has taught her, she likes to say, “everything I know.” There’s the rub. She is someone who, because of her own private emotional turmoil, locked on to Seventies-era feminism and never let go.
MacKinnon has a cold, inflexible, and fundamentally unscholarly mind. She is a propagandist and casuist, good at constructing ad hoc arguments from expedience for specific political aims. But her knowledge of intellectual or world history is limited, and as a researcher she has remarkably poor judgment in evaluating sources. She wildly overpraises weak feminist writers and has no feeling whatever for psychology, a defect that makes her conclusions about sex ridiculous. She is a Stalinist who believes that art must serve a political agenda and that all opposing voices are enemies of humanity who must be silenced. MacKinnon and Dworkin are fanatics, zealots, fundamentalists of the new feminist religion. Their alliance with the reactionary, anti-porn far right is no coincidence.
MacKinnon is a classic WASP who painstakingly builds huge, rigid structures of words in complete obliviousness to the organic, sensual, and visual. She is a twentieth-century puritan whose upbringing—a stern Minnesota judge as father, Episcopalian and conservative Republican—seems straight out of Hawthorne. MacKinnon’s pinched, cramped, body-denying Protestant culture made her peculiarly susceptible to Andrea Dworkin, whose let-it-all-hang-out ethnicity was initially liberating. MacKinnon’s stolid lack of psychology drew her to Dworkin’s boiling emotionalism and self-analytic, self-lacerating Jewishness. In return, MacKinnon, the third-generation Smith College WASP insider, satisfied Dworkin’s longings for establishment acceptance, a nagging theme in her writing.
Dworkin, like Kate Millett, has turned a garish history of mental instability into feminist grand opera. Dworkin publicly boasts of her bizarre multiple rapes, assaults, beatings, breakdowns and tacky traumas, as if her inability to cope with life were the patriarchy’s fault rather than her own. She pretends to be a daring truth-teller but never mentions her most obvious problem: food. Hence she is a hypocrite. Dworkin’s shrill, kvetching, solipsistic prose has a sloppy, squalling infantilism. This attracted MacKinnon, with her dour background of Protestant high seriousness, which treats children like miniature adults. MacKinnon’s impersonal prose is dry, bleached, parched. Her hereditary north-country, anal-retentive style, stingy and nitpicking, was counterbalanced by Dworkin’s raging undifferentiated orality, her buckets of chicken soup spiked with spite.
Dworkin, wallowing in misery, is a “type” that I recognize after twenty-two years of teaching. I call her The Girl with the Eternal Cold. This was the pudgy, clumsy, whiny child at summer camp who was always spilling her milk, dropping her lollipop in the dirt, getting a cramp on the hike, a stone in her shoe, a bee in her hair. In college, this type—pasty, bilious, and frumpy—is constantly sick from fall to spring. She coughs and sneezes on everyone, is never prepared with tissue and sits sniffling in class with a roll of toilet paper on her lap. She is the ultimate teacher’s pest, the morose, unlovable child who never got her mama’s approval and therefore demands attention at any price. Dworkin seized on feminism as a mask to conceal her bitterness at this tedious, banal family drama.
MacKinnon and Dworkin have become a pop duo, like Mutt and Jeff, Steve and Eydie, Ron and Nancy. MacKinnon, starved and weather-beaten, is a fierce gargoyle of American Gothic. With her witchy tumbleweed hair, she resembles the batty, gritty pioneer woman played by Agnes Moorehead on The Twilight Zone. Or she’s Nurse Diesel, the preachy secret sadist in Mel Brooks’s High Anxiety.
Dworkin is Pee-wee Herman’s Large Marge, the demon trucker who keeps returning to the scene of her fatal accident. I see MacKinnon and Dworkin making a female buddy picture like Thelma & Louise. Their characters: Penny Wise and Pound Foolish, the puritan Gibson Girl and her fuming dybbuk, the glutton for punishment. Or they’d be perfect for the starring roles in a TV docudrama about prissy, repressed J. Edgar Hoover and his longtime companion, Clyde Tolson, bugging hotel rooms and sticking their noses into everyone’s business.
MacKinnon and Dworkin detest pornography because it symbolizes everything they don’t understand and can’t control about their own bodies. Current feminism, with its anti-science and social
constructionist bias, never thinks about nature. Hence it cannot deal with sex, which begins in the body and is energized by instinctual drives. MacKinnon and Dworkin’s basic error is in identifying pornography with society, which they then simplistically define as patriarchal and oppressive. In fact, pornography, which erupts into the open in periods of personal freedom, shows the dark truth about nature, concealed by the artifices of civilization. Pornography is about lust, our animal reality that will never be fully tamed by love. Lust is elemental, aggressive, asocial. Pornography allows us to explore our deepest, most forbidden selves.
The MacKinnon-Dworkin party line on pornography is preposterous. “Pornography is sex discrimination,” they declared in their Minneapolis ordinance. In a manifesto, they call pornography “hate literature.” “Most women hate pornography; all pornography hates women.” MacKinnon and Dworkin display an astounding ignorance of the ancient, sacred pornographic tradition of non-Western societies, as well as that of our own gay male culture. Dworkin’s blanket condemnation of fellatio as disgusting and violent should make every man furious.
MacKinnon and Dworkin are victim-mongers, ambulance chasers, atrocity addicts. MacKinnon begins every argument from big, flawed premises such as “male supremacy” or “misogyny,” while Dworkin spouts glib Auschwitz metaphors at the drop of a bra. Here’s one of their typical maxims: “The pornographers rank with Nazis and Klansmen in promoting hatred and violence.” Anyone who could write such a sentence knows nothing about pornography or Nazism. Pornography does not cause rape or violence, which predate pornography by thousands of years. Rape and violence occur not because of patriarchal conditioning but because of the opposite, a breakdown of social controls. MacKinnon and Dworkin, like most feminists today, lack a general knowledge of criminology or psychopathology and hence have no perspective on or insight into the bloody, lurid human record, with its disasters and triumphs.
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