Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  Similarly, public schools have no business listing the varieties of sexual gratification, from masturbation to oral and anal sex, although health educators should nonjudgmentally answer student questions about the health implications of such practices. The issue of homosexuality is a charged one. In my view, anti-bullying campaigns, however laudable, should not stray into political endorsement of homosexuality. While students must be free to create gay-identified groups, the schools themselves should remain neutral and allow society to evolve on its own.

  28

  IT’S TIME TO LET TEENAGERS DRINK AGAIN

  THE AGE-21 RULE PUSHES KIDS TOWARD PILLS AND OTHER ANTISOCIAL BEHAVIOR

  The National Minimum Drinking Age Act, passed by Congress 30 years ago this July, is a gross violation of civil liberties and must be repealed. It is absurd and unjust that young Americans can vote, marry, enter contracts, and serve in the military at 18 but cannot buy an alcoholic drink in a bar or restaurant. The age-21 rule sets the United States apart from all other advanced Western nations and lumps it with small or repressive countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Indonesia, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.

  Congress was stampeded into this puritanical law by Mothers Against Drunk Driving, who with all good intentions wrongly intruded into an area of personal choice exactly as did the hymn-singing nineteenth-century temperance crusaders, typified by Carry Nation smashing beer barrels with her hatchet. Temperance fanaticism eventually triumphed and gave us 14 years of Prohibition. That in turn spawned the crime syndicates for booze smuggling, laying the groundwork for today’s global drug trade. Thanks a lot, Carry!

  [Time, May 19, 2014]

  Now that marijuana regulations have been liberalized in Colorado, it’s time to strike down this dictatorial national law. Government is not our nanny. The decrease in drunk-driving deaths in recent decades is at least partly attributable to more uniform seat-belt use and a strengthening of DWI penalties. Today, furthermore, there are many other causes of traffic accidents, such as the careless use of cell phones or prescription drugs like Ambien—implicated in the recent trial and acquittal of Kerry Kennedy for driving while impaired.

  Learning how to drink responsibly is a basic lesson in growing up—as it is in wine-drinking France or in Germany, with its family-oriented beer gardens and festivals. Wine was built into my own Italian-American upbringing, where children were given sips of my grandfather’s homemade wine. This civilized practice descends from antiquity. Beer was a nourishing food in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and wine was identified with the life force in Greece and Rome: In vino veritas (in wine, truth). Wine as a sacred symbol of unity and regeneration remains in the Christian Communion service. Virginia Woolf wrote that wine with a fine meal lights a “subtle and subterranean glow, which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse.”

  What the cruel 1984 law did is deprive young people of safe spaces where they could happily drink cheap beer, socialize, chat, and flirt in a free but controlled public environment. Hence in the 1980s we immediately got the scourge of crude binge drinking at campus fraternity keg parties, cut off from the adult world. Women in that boorish free-for-all were suddenly fighting off date rape. Club drugs—ecstasy, methamphetamine, ketamine (a veterinary tranquilizer)—surged at raves for teenagers and on the gay-male circuit scene.

  Alcohol relaxes, facilitates interaction, inspires ideas, and promotes humor and hilarity. Used in moderation, it is quickly flushed from the system, with excess punished by a hangover. But deadening pills, such as today’s massively overprescribed anti-depressants, linger in the body and brain and may have unrecognized long-term side effects. Those toxic chemicals, often manufactured by shadowy firms abroad, have been worrisomely present in a recent uptick of unexplained suicides and massacres. Half of the urban professional class in the United States seems doped on meds these days.

  As a libertarian, I support the decriminalization of marijuana, but there are many problems with pot. From my observation, pot may be great for jazz musicians and Beat poets, but it saps energy and willpower and can produce physiological feminization in men. Also, it is difficult to measure the potency of plant-derived substances like pot. With brand-name beer or liquor, however, purchased doses have exactly the same strength and purity from one continent to another, with no fear of contamination by dangerous street additives like PCP.

  Exhilaration, ecstasy, and communal vision are the gifts of Dionysus, god of wine. Alcohol’s enhancement of direct face-to-face dialogue is precisely what is needed by today’s technologically agile generation, magically interconnected yet strangely isolated by social media. Clumsy hardcore sexting has sadly supplanted simple hanging out over a beer at a buzzing dive. By undermining the art of conversation, the age-21 law has also had a disastrous effect on our arts and letters, with their increasing dullness and mediocrity. This tyrannical infantilizing of young Americans must stop!

  29

  CLIQUISH, TUNNEL-VISION INTOLERANCE AFFLICTS TOO MANY FEMINISTS

  INTERVIEW WITH DEBORAH COUGHLIN, FEMINIST TIMES

  When the Daily Mail described our interviewee as a “dissident feminist” last December we knew we had to talk to this outsider of mainstream feminism, professor and writer Camille Paglia. I wanted to know why it’s not easy to slot her into a “camp,” what we can learn from her dissidence, and whether, looking back, she would consider acting differently in the public sphere. Has Paglia mellowed with age? Erm, that would be a big, bellowing NO!

  The Daily Mail described you as a “dissident feminist” and then went on to list a series of counterintuitive opinions you are reported as having. Why is it important for a feminist to be “dissident”? Do you ever play devil’s advocate, and do we need feminists who are “controversial”?

  [Feminist Times (U.K.), July 14, 2014]

  I am a dissident because my system of beliefs, worked out over the past five decades, has been repeatedly attacked, defamed, and rejected by feminist leaders and their acolytes across a wide spectrum, both in and out of academe. This punitive style of mob ostracism began from the very start of second-wave feminism, when Betty Friedan was pushed out of the National Organization for Women by younger and more radical women, including fanatical lesbian separatists.

  As a graduate student in 1970, I quietly clashed with future bestselling lesbian novelist Rita Mae Brown at an early feminist conference held at the Yale Law School. Brown said, “The difference between you and me, Camille, is that you want to save the universities and I want to burn them down.” The next year, I nearly got into a fistfight with the New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band over my defense of the Rolling Stones. Two years after that, as a Bennington College teacher at dinner at an Albany restaurant, I had an angry confrontation with the founding faculty of the pioneering women’s studies program of the State University of New York when they sweepingly dismissed any role of hormones in human development. They accused me of being “brainwashed by male scientists,” a charge I still find stupid and contemptible. (I walked out before dessert, thereby boycotting the feminist event we were all headed to.)

  There was a steady stream of other such unpleasant incidents, but everything paled in comparison to the international firestorm of lies and libel that greeted me after the publication in 1990 of my first book, Sexual Personae (a 700-page expansion of my Yale dissertation). It’s all documented and detailed in the back of my two essay collections, but let me give just one example. In 1992, Gloria Steinem, the czarina of U.S. feminism, sat enthroned with her designated heirs, Susan Faludi and Naomi Wolf, on the stage of New York’s 92nd Street Y and, when asked a question about me from the floor, replied: “We don’t give a shit what she thinks.” The moment was caught by TV cameras and broadcast by CBS’s 60 Minutes program. Faludi has monotonously insisted over the years that I am not a feminist but “only play one on TV.” Well, who made Faludi pope? Neither she nor any other feminist has the right to canonize or excommunicate.

  I remain an equal-
opportunity feminist. That is, I call for the removal of all barriers to women’s advance in the professional and political realms. However, I oppose special protections for women (such as differential treatment of the names of accuser and accused in rape cases), and I condemn speech codes of any kind, above all on university campuses. Furthermore, as a libertarian, I maintain that our private sexual and emotional worlds are too mercurial and ambiguous to obey the codes that properly govern the workplace. As I recently told The Village Voice, I maintain that everyone has a bisexual potential and that no one is born gay. We need a more flexible psychology, as well as an end to the bitter feminist war on men. My feminist doctrine is completely on the record in four of my six books.

  As for playing “devil’s advocate,” I can’t imagine a committed feminist engaging in that kind of silly game. The real problem is the cliquish, tunnel-vision intolerance that afflicts too many feminists, who seem unprepared to recognize and analyze ideas. In both the United States and Britain, there has been far too much addiction to “theory” in poststructuralist and postmodernist gender studies. With its opaque jargon and elitist poses, theory is no way to build a real-world movement. My system of pro-sex feminism has been constructed by a combination of scholarly research and everyday social observation.

  The infamous faxes between you and Julie Burchill in The Modern Review are still very much the stuff of legend in the U.K.’s media. Any regret about the whole thing? If you were mentoring a young Camille today, how would you tell her to deal with that kind of situation? All guns blazing, take her down, and combative, or would you be recommending some mindfulness, meditation, and understanding?

  There is not a single thing I would change in my handling of that acrimonious 1993 episode. British journalist Julie Burchill gratuitously attacked and insulted me, and I responded in kind. Our exchanges continued, with my replies getting longer and hers getting shorter, until she realized she had misjudged her opponent and “bottled out” (a British locution for beating a hasty retreat that I heard for the first time from an amused Times reporter commenting on the battle).

  I learned how to jab and parry from my early models, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, and Mary McCarthy. Germaine Greer, whom I deeply admire, has always been glorious in combat. As for mentoring a young Camille Paglia, I would tell her to study my martial arts moves and do likewise!

  We have found ourselves in the midst of many similar battles of wits online, as Twitter is effectively publishing everyone’s faxes. As someone who can give as good as you get, how do you feel about some prominent feminists and writers being hounded off Twitter by other feminists? What do you think Twitter is doing for feminism—making it narcissistic, polarized, and too noisy, or democratic, pluralist, and a thriving community?

  It’s a sad comment on the current state of feminism that the movement has been reduced to the manic fragments and instant obsolescence of Twitter. Although I adore the Web and was a co-founding contributor to Salon.com from its very first issue in 1995, I have no interest whatever in social media. My publisher maintains an informational Facebook page for me on the Random House site, but I don’t do Facebook or Twitter and wouldn’t even know how.

  It is difficult to understand how a generation raised on the slapdash jumpiness of Twitter and texting will ever develop a logical, coherent, distinctive voice in writing and argumentation. And without strong books and essays as a permanent repository for new ideas, modern movements eventually sputter out for lack of continuity and rationale. Hasty, blathering blogging (without taking time for reflection and revision) is also degrading the general quality of prose writing.

  As for feminists being hounded off Twitter by other feminists, how trivial and adolescent that sounds! Both sides should get offline and read more—history, sociology, psychology, and the big neglected subject, biology. How can the greater world, much less men, ever take feminism seriously if its most ardent proponents behave like catty sorority girls throwing hissy fits at the high-school cafeteria?

  The two feminist issues that create the most noise on Twitter, and generate backlash whichever way you side, are the sex industry and gender, the latter especially in relation to transgenderism. What are your thoughts on both?

  I support, defend, and admire prostitutes, gay or straight. They do important and necessary work, whether moralists of the left and right like it or not. Child prostitution and sexual slavery are of course an infringement of civil liberties and must be stringently policed and prohibited.

  Feminists who think they can abolish the sex trade are in a state of massive delusion. Only a ruthless, fascist regime of vast scale could eradicate the rogue sex impulse that is indistinguishable from the life force. Simply in the Western world, pagan sexuality has survived 2000 years of Judeo-Christian persecution and is hardly going to be defeated by a few feminists whacking at it with their brooms.

  Transgenderism has taken off like a freight train and has become nearly impossible to discuss with the analytic neutrality that honest and ethical scholarship requires. First of all, let me say that I consider myself a transgender being, neither man nor woman, and I would welcome the introduction of “OTHER” as a gender category in passports and other government documents. I telegraphed my gender dissidence from early childhood in the 1950s through flamboyantly male Halloween costumes (a Roman soldier, a matador, Napoleon, etc.) that were then shockingly unheard of for girls.

  As a libertarian, I believe that every individual has the right to modify his or her body at will. But I am concerned about the current climate, inflamed by half-baked postmodernist gender theory, which convinces young people who may have other unresolved personal or family issues that sex-reassignment surgery is a golden road to happiness and true identity.

  How has it happened that so many of today’s most daring and radical young people now define themselves by sexual identity alone? There has been a collapse of perspective here that will surely have mixed consequences for our art and culture and that may perhaps undermine the ability of Western societies to understand or react to the vehemently contrary beliefs of others who do not wish us well. As I showed in Sexual Personae, which began as a study of androgyny in literature and art, transgender phenomena multiply and spread in “late” phases of culture, as religious, political, and family traditions weaken and civilizations begin to decline. I will continue to celebrate androgyny, but I am under no illusions about what it may portend for the future.

  30

  SOUTHERN WOMEN: OLD MYTHS AND NEW FRONTIERS

  Young women today face a multitude of choices about their future lives. The career system is open to them, and many barriers of discrimination have fallen, through a combination of state regulation and social change. Yet challenges remain for women who would like to combine a career with marriage and motherhood. From the perspective of the past 5,000 years of civilization, this territory truly remains a new frontier.

  [Honors College Convocation Lecture, Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College, University of Mississippi, September 16, 2014]

  Since the incendiary culture wars of the 1980s and early ’90s, which received heavy media coverage, feminism has mostly receded to online blogs and sporadic street theater. Surveys have shown that a majority of young women, here and abroad, no longer identify with feminism—and surely that is at least partly due to the unnecessarily punitive anti-male tone that still pervades too much feminist discourse. While sexual minorities have been central to my work since graduate school, I am more concerned here with the majority of women who seek life partnerships with men. I have felt for a very long time that Southern women, for a variety of cultural reasons, have achieved a formula of cordial yet confident self-presentation that seems superior to the more militant and sometimes hectoring persona of Northern women, which may descend from New England Puritanism. For this lecture, I read widely in Southern history and tried to answer these questions for myself. Do Southern women, both white and black, have a personal power that Northern women have l
ost or never had? And if so, what is it, and how can it be preserved and redefined for the future?

  Later in my talk, I will present three major examples of old myths about Southern women that have been bitterly contested and even rejected outright but that remain very much alive because they are so embedded in novels, movies, TV, and advertising. My argument is that each of these antiquated stereotypes does in fact contain a residue of authentic power that can be extracted, salvaged, and reincorporated in new models of contemporary selfhood to inspire and motivate. All three myths have some basis in historical reality. They are: the fierce old Appalachian mountain woman with her dirt boots and corncob pipe; the nurturing mammy of antebellum plantation households, whose edited image controversially persists in the logo for Aunt Jemima pancake mix; and the Southern belle, an idealized symbol of the white planter elite before and after the Civil War.

  A crucial point is the agrarian roots of these three myths. In my opinion, second-wave feminism, for all its professed concern for mainstream, working-class, or disenfranchised women, has drifted toward privileging the concerns and complaints of upper-middle-class career women, who seek the lofty status and material rewards of an economic system built by and for men. Despite the rapid growth of urban centers like Atlanta over the past 40 years, the American South remains strongly rural in its traditions and assumptions. I am particularly alert to this theme because I am only one generation removed from the farm; my mother and all four of my grandparents were born in the Italian countryside, and many branches of the family still reside there. In grade school, furthermore, I lived for a while on a working dairy farm when my father was teaching high school in the village of Oxford in upstate New York. It is my thesis that country women were and are stronger both physically and mentally than most of today’s affluent, successful professional women obsessively doing their Pilates in fancy urban gyms.