Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  Western culture of the twentieth century has probably seen the greatest changes in women in all of world history. The respectable lady of 1907 would be shocked indeed by the kind of aggressive, outspoken, and even raunchy women that are all around us in 1997. These changes have occurred with such speed that we are suffering a kind of sexual vertigo. We are trying to find our balance. Thirty years after the sexual revolution of my generation, there are signs that many people are looking back toward tradition again, seeking, particularly after they have children, firm compass points by which to live. To dismiss this as merely “conservative” would be quite wrong, for the epidemic of divorce as well as the spread of drugs among the young should tell us that all is not well with Western culture.

  The transition away from 1960s values may well have been the arrival of Diana Spencer on the scene in 1981. There was an unexpectedly immense international response, particularly by young people, to the fairy-tale wedding of Charles and Diana. Diana was in many ways a conventional young woman, without much education or major career ambitions. She sought a traditional role as wife and mother; her primary mission was to produce heirs. And like many other young women, she was interested in fashion and glamour in ways that were considered superficial and frivolous by intellectuals and media cynics at the time. But the mass audience adored her, and she inspired among young women a widespread return to the romance and regalia of weddings. I avidly followed the Diana phenomenon throughout the 1980s. It made me see how disjunct feminist thinking had become from the sensibilities of ordinary women, whom feminism should be serving. Now in 1997, after the staggering response to her tragic death only three months ago, no one can be in any doubt about Diana’s impact, which crossed lines of race and nationality. One has to ask, could any man have aroused such feeling? Diana demonstrates the elusive mystique of sex differences, which we should be interested in studying again. Diana’s appeal was from a level of subliminal, primal emotion that we have no language for outside of art.

  Now let us return to feminist history in this century. Women’s great push forward onto the public stage in the 1920s and 1930s was terminated by the disasters of World War Two, when Western civilization itself fought for survival. Following that war, there was in Europe exhaustion and recovery, a gray period even for the victors. And in America, which was untouched physically by the war but which paid dearly in lives and treasure on two distant fronts, there was a period of surface tranquility with repressed inner disturbances. This very conformist, domestic era, into which my so-called baby-boom generation was born, returned sex roles to their traditional strict polarization. We young people did not understand the traumas that our parents suffered, since around us there were no physical signs of war, like the devastation in southern England and Europe. Our parents, born in the 1920s, had experienced the Depression and witnessed the rise of fascism and Nazism. They were recuperating, and they wanted something better for their children. Hence we were raised in an artificially “normal” environment that many of us found unbearable.

  The women’s movement that erupted in the 1960s was only one of many responses to the social repression of the 1950s. Feminist activism had so disappeared after the winning of suffrage that when Simone de Beauvoir was writing her great book, The Second Sex, in Paris after World War Two, her project was already regarded as somewhat quaint and scarcely of pressing concern. The reemergence of the organized women’s movement happened after the publication in 1963 of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which was certainly inspired by de Beauvoir’s example. Friedan spoke of the malaise of white middle-class suburban housewives and exposed their dissatisfactions, their inability to express their creative talents outside the home. Friedan was simply calling for greater opportunities for women. She would always remain grounded in the everyday life of mainstream housewives and mothers.

  But Betty Friedan represented an older generation. My 1960s generation had its own story and its own battles, early signs of which came in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964. Popular culture—Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones—was our native expression. Histories of feminism credit Friedan with more than she did, for there was a brand-new spirit already at work in my rebellious generation, which not incidentally profited from the development of the first reliable contraceptive pill.

  When we survey the twentieth century, it would be quite wrong to say that the feminist movement is entirely responsible for the modern transformation in sex roles. Far more consequential was the role of popular culture, Hollywood in particular, in disseminating a new image of women in movies shown around the world from the mid-1920s on. Just to give one example of an alternate genealogy: in the early 1960s, before Friedan’s book was published, I myself as a teenager had been obsessively pursuing a research project on the aviatrix Amelia Earhart, whom I celebrated, to the bafflement of my schoolmates, as a model of assertive womanhood. And in the mid-1960s, I felt, from the vast wintry landscape of upstate New York, that I had two spiritual homes: Andy Warhol’s Manhattan studio, the Factory, with its decadent gay aesthetes and drag queens, and second, Swinging Sixties London, with its Mods and dandies. The innovations of Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon, and David Bailey made me see fashion and fashion photography as the essence of modernity. And the electrifying Diana Rigg in The Avengers prefigured feminism before it made news. Hence I have fiercely resisted the majority opinion in feminist theory, coming from outmoded paradigms of the old left, that fashion and popular culture are politically retrograde, an exploitative system of commodification devised by heterosexist, capitalist imperialists. Such clichéd ways of thinking, in my view, are hopelessly inadequate for dealing with the complexities of contemporary life.

  The leading feminists have mostly come from the Anglo-American tradition. Even a Jewish thinker like Betty Friedan shares what I have called the word-fetishism of Anglo-American culture, which confuses language with reality and leads to an inability to understand images, which are the pagan essence of Babylonian Hollywood. Both Madonna and I, as lapsed Catholics, have brought a Mediterranean point of view to late-twentieth-century feminism. We respect sensuality and the Dionysian, with its deep, dark earth rhythms, as well as the more Apollonian phenomena of glamour, fashion, and the idolatry of stars, a taste we share with gay men.

  After Betty Friedan co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966, the group was almost immediately riven by internal dissension, eventually so intense that it would drive Friedan herself out of the group. There was a conflict between the older women, who, like the liberal Friedan, were mothers and wives, and the younger women coming out of the radical student protest movement, who were far more confrontational. The latter would be joined by militant lesbians, who forced an argument about what status lesbianism should have in the movement. Some felt that the lesbian should be hailed as the ultimate liberated woman, who did not need men. Friedan thought the movement must remain close to the lives of ordinary women, and that polemical lesbianism would be an inflammatory distraction threatening the mainstream success of the movement. With the success of the gay liberation movement after the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969, this argument increased in ferocity.

  A spate of books in 1970 and 1971 demonstrated both the positive and the negative in the new feminism. First was Kate Millett’s book, Sexual Politics, which created what I call the Stalinist style of feminist criticism, a form of vandalism. It strides into great literature and art with jackboots on and red pen in hand, checking off “racist,” “sexist,” “homophobic,” peremptorily decreeing what should remain and what should be discarded. That one book drove away from the still-nascent feminist movement many serious women thinkers and scholars. Millett’s book offered sanctuary to those who were looking for dogma, who longed for a religion to supplant the one they had abandoned.

  Then Germaine Greer burst on the scene in 1970 with her marvelous book, The Female Eunuch, with its blistering attack on the exploitation of the f
emale body in popular culture and advertising. Greer’s international tour to promote that book was for me the zenith of twentieth-century feminism. Everything has been downhill ever since! Greer’s impact in America was enormous. She was formidable—witty, learned, stylish, and sexy, the charismatic superstar that feminism wanted and needed at that time. Within a few short years the exhilaration of that moment was over. Greer herself was no longer the same person, and her positions seemed to harden against sex, men, and art. It would be unfair to blame Greer for what happened, because there was an enormous cultural shift that remains to be understood. The 1960s, flowing into the early 1970s, seem to have imploded from their own excesses. We are still sorting through the political fallout of that period, which marked the beginning of the disintegration and retraction of the old left.

  If I were asked what or whom should be put into a time capsule as a legacy of the twentieth century, I would name three emblematic women: Amelia Earhart, who conquered the world of masculine adventure; Katharine Hepburn, who embodied in life and film an enormous range of authoritative female personae; and Germaine Greer at her debut and high point. These three would symbolize the new twentieth-century woman.

  However, having said that, I must note what is missing from this triad. All these women were childless. Here is one of the great dilemmas facing women at the end of the century. Second-wave feminist rhetoric placed blame for the female condition entirely on men, or specifically on “patriarchy,” an overused and nebulous term that might well apply to Republican Rome or Victorian England but is historically specious and should be discarded. The exclusive focus of feminism was on an external social mechanism that had to be smashed or reformed. It failed to take into account women’s intricate connection with nature—that is, with procreation.

  In this era of the career woman, there has been a denigration or devaluing of the role of motherhood. Feminism must not become over-absorbed with expanding the privileges of upper-middle-class professional women. Feminist activism of the past decade has become increasingly focused on office politics. My position is that women must enter the arena of power without asking for special protections that are not accorded to men. Hence I have strongly opposed preferential quotas. And I call for moderate sexual harassment guidelines that must not infringe on other people’s rights in the workplace or create a reactionary double standard that defines women as somehow weaker, frailer, or purer than men. The secondary “hostile workplace” clause in sexual harassment policy is, I think, inhibiting women’s progress and guaranteeing that men will treat them with suspicion rather than full collegiality. Every workplace is hostile for both women and men; testing, challenge, and potential sabotage are everywhere. Women must learn how to maneuver and negotiate for their own territory from the moment they arrive on the scene of any office or schoolroom.

  The focus on the professional career ladder has led to a neglect of the problems facing mothers. From the start, second-wave feminists vigorously lobbied for improvements in women’s health care and have recently succeeded in expanding U.S. government support for medical research into female ailments such as breast cancer. But too many feminists now seem interested in motherhood only as it relates to day care, private or government-supported—in other words, child-rearing is seen as merely an adjunct to success in the workplace.

  I dedicated my first book to my two grandmothers, because I felt that these women of the Italian countryside, with their roots in a village life that had not substantially changed in a thousand years, had an awesome majesty and power and a greater stature than that of any feminist I have yet met. Yet they rarely left the kitchen, the warm shrine of the home, from dawn to midnight. Their slow, pre-modern rhythms were mesmerizing.

  Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of the mother in human life. Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts. There was a rational division of labor from the hunter and gatherer period that had its roots not in the male desire to subjugate and imprison but in the procreative burden which has fallen on woman from nature. It is woman who bears most of the responsibility in the process of procreation. The male contribution to procreation is momentary, a mere pin-prick, but the human female makes an enormous investment in the nine months of pregnancy, which could formerly not be forestalled or controlled as it can today. Even now, pregnancy is a risky business that can still result in the death of the mother. Anything can go wrong and often does. Before modern medicine, the mortality rate in childbirth was enormous. In early history, women in advanced pregnancy or just after childbirth were extraordinarily vulnerable; they could not fend for themselves and required the protection of men. Feminist theory has been grotesquely unfair to men in refusing to acknowledge the enormous care that most men have provided to women and children. The atrocious exceptions have been used by feminist theorists to blame all men, when over the whole of human history, men have given heroically of their energy and labor and indeed their lives to benefit and protect women and children. Feminism has been very small-minded in the way it has treated male history. Feminism cannot continue with this poisoned rhetoric—it is disastrous for young women to be indoctrinated to think in that negative way about men.

  When men step out of line, women should deal with it on the spot. Most men are cowed by women! Any woman worth her salt should know how to deal with men and put them in their place. Women must demand respect, and over time they will get it. It is foolish to think that substantial change in human psychology or sexual relationships can be achieved through legislation and regulation, that is, through authoritarian intrusion into private life.

  Motherhood has become so secondary to professional ambitions in the American middle class that it is impossible to imagine a second-year undergraduate at an Ivy League university, for example, announcing to her friends that she plans to drop out, get married, and have a baby. She would be treated as a traitor to her class. “You’re wasting your life,” she would be told. “You’re throwing away your expensive education. You are a future leader!” So these girls of 18, 19, and 20 are coerced not to listen to their bodies but to suppress natural instinct for some ultimate professional goal, which they may or may not be interested in and which may take a decade or more to come to fruition. It is no coincidence that these elite schools have suffered an epidemic of eating disorders, which originate not with fashion magazines, as some have falsely claimed, but with a deep disturbance in female sexual identity rooted in ambitious, demanding, and overprotective middle-class families.

  The male undergraduates at these campuses where feminist rhetoric is at its most intense are a sad, puny lot, routinely portrayed as rapists, but in fact they are men on the leash, intimidated by female demands. Often the products of professional homes where the mother worked, these boys accept women taking positions of power in the world. But what is the result? Is it a new paradise of sexual relations? Are these new, evolved males desirable in terms of social history? These boys have nothing to offer women; many seem to be graduating at 21 with the mental age of 13. The irony is that the more that men accept the feminist line on what women want, the less women want them. In the professional white middle class, the sizzle is going out of sexual relations. It could well be that testosterone levels are stimulated by testing and swagger, by conflict and challenge—in other words, by some unpleasant degree of sex war, without which boys do not become men.

  I fear very much for the state of sexual relations in America, and I want to warn England and the world that as feminism goes global, as it surely must, it should not make the mistakes of American feminism. There has been a disastrous institutionalization of feminism on college campuses, where it has become insular and autocratic, virtually a state religion, distorting course content and faculty hiring in collusion with the paternalistic pampering of students by a caretaker class of overpaid, social-welfare-oriented administrators.

  Again, the question of motherhood is central. I have tried to bri
ng the missing term of nature back onto the feminist agenda after a quarter century when the dominant ideology has been social constructionism, which alleges that we are born blank slates and that we become male and female not via biology but through social conditioning or environmental influences. I have argued, in Sexual Personae, that sexuality is “the intricate intersection of nature and culture” and that we need to understand both in order to understand ourselves. Beginning in the 1970s, there was an irrational pressure in feminism to deny any kind of hormonal basis to sex differences, a scientifically illiterate fantasy that still flourishes today in postmodern culture studies.

  Because of my childhood revolt against the restrictive codes of the 1950s, I leaned early toward sexual relativism and initially thought that sex roles are entirely fictive and that they change from culture to culture and period to period. However, once I began to study the subject systematically in graduate school, in doing the research for what became Sexual Personae, my investigations into anthropology and medicine began to convince me that this was wrong. The more I learned, the more I realized that despite many superficial differences of sexual behavior and sexual rituals, there is an amazing underlying congruence. I found more agreement than disagreement in sexual definitions over time and concluded that there are certain fundamental principles of human life that return again and again. In my work I have characterized shamans and artists as an exceptional class whose inner sexual fluidity is inseparable from their prophetic gift. But I have serious doubts about whether androgyny can usefully be extended as a master plan for the human race.

  Although I am an historian of the arts, I have always deeply respected science. What teaching about gender can there possibly be at the university level without a foundation in science?—which the majority of those currently teaching in women’s studies utterly lack. So this is the second of the major deficiencies that I find in feminist theory that simply must be remedied as the millennium approaches. We cannot have a feminism that is hostile to great art, and we cannot have a feminism that is hostile to science.