Free Women, Free Men

by Camille Paglia

  Misled by the naive optimism and “You go, girl!” boosterism of their upbringing, young women do not see the animal eyes glowing at them in the dark. They assume that bared flesh and sexy clothes are just a fashion statement containing no messages that might be misread and twisted by a psychotic. They do not understand the fragility of civilization and the constant nearness of savage nature.

  * Hannah Graham’s body was found on October 18, 2014 in an abandoned house outside Charlottesville, Virginia.

  32

  WHY I LOVE THE REAL HOUSEWIVES

  Bravo TV’s Real Housewives franchise isn’t entertainment to me—it’s a lifestyle. I watch virtually nothing else on television now, except for occasional documentaries and Turner Classic Movies. I can see the same Real Housewives episode multiple times with equal enjoyment. I love the frank display of emotion, the intricate interrelationships, and the sharp-elbows jockeying for power and visibility. I appreciate every snippet—the rapid scene set-ups, dynamic camera work, and crisp editing, with its enchanting glimpses of fine houses and restaurants and its glowing appreciation of beautiful objects, from flowers and tableware to jewelry and couture. And I applaud the Real Housewives master theme of the infectious hilarity and truth-telling delirium induced by copious alcohol, that ancient Dionysian elixir! (Get off those boring, flattening anti-depressants, America!)

  [The Daily Dish, bravotv.com, March 7, 2014]

  When Donna Mills left Knots Landing in 1989, it was the end of a glorious soap era. I went into deep mourning. Soaps had fallen very far indeed from their sizzling heyday, marked by the dramatic January 1976 Time magazine cover showing an anguished, posturing, bosom-baring Susan Seaforth Hayes backed by her pleading real-life husband, Bill Hayes, the stars of Days of Our Lives, with the blazing headline, “SOAP OPERAS: SEX AND SUFFERING IN THE AFTERNOON”!

  But over the decades, daytime writers got uppity and began to disdain their own genre. They strained for “importance” and lost their soap soul. In a two-part interview with Michael Logan for TV Guide in 1994, I complained about the upsetting decline and accused soaps of abandoning the great female “trash-and-sleaze” style of Old Hollywood. I said that, with her magical ability to produce “one perfect tear,” Melody Thomas Scott as Nikki Newman on The Young and the Restless was among the last explorers of profound emotion in the grand old mode. My protest evidently struck a chord: I was told that Tony Geary, the famous heart-throb Luke Spencer of General Hospital, marched into a network producer’s office, slammed that article on the desk, and demanded better scripts.

  As TV soaps diluted themselves to the vanishing point, I had to get my soap fix from the vintage movies that started it all: Stella Dallas, The Women, Dark Victory, Mildred Pierce, All About Eve, Imitation of Life, A Star Is Born, Written on the Wind, Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, I’ll Cry Tomorrow, The Best of Everything, Valley of the Dolls, and Mommie Dearest. The Group, Julia, Rich and Famous, and Black Widow also give good soap, with their intense, competitive, woman-on-woman psychodramas. Nearly all those movies had become cult classics among gay men, who were also often connoisseurs of grand opera. Gay men understand the burden of secrets and the ecstasy of the extreme gesture.

  Haggard and bereft, I felt like John the Baptist—a voice crying in the wilderness. But then with a thunderclap out of St. Louis came the Soap Messiah—Andy Cohen! (Jesus was Jewish. What’s the problem?) In his autobiography, Most Talkative, Cohen describes his early passionate devotion to Susan Lucci, who for 41 years as Erica Kane on All My Children defined the archetype of the charismatic bitch-goddess for daytime TV. Cohen has always understood the complex emotional core of soaps, a misty, mercurial realm that is beyond words. The torment and tears on Real Housewives are real—from Jacqueline Laurita’s pained hope for her autistic son in New Jersey to Kandi Burruss’s struggle for freedom against her mother in Atlanta.

  Cohen has so altered and redeemed the pop culture landscape—which had been suffering for years from snide snark and pseudo-hip cynicism—that he should be acknowledged as a genuine auteur, like maverick film directors. His tastes, instincts, and sensibility now suffuse a staggering number of highly successful TV projects. Not since the radical gay German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder revived and recast Douglas Sirk’s “women’s pictures” during the 1970s has a single individual so boldly rescued a waning genre and given it such splendid new life. Bravo, Andy!

  33

  WHAT A WOMAN PRESIDENT SHOULD BE LIKE

  Why has the United States, the cradle of modern democracy, never had a woman president?

  Incredulous young feminists, watching female heads of state multiply from Brazil and Norway to Namibia and Bangladesh, denounce this glaring omission as blatant sexism. But there are systemic factors, arising from the Constitution, popular tradition, and our electoral process, that have inhibited American women from attaining the highest office in the land.

  The U.S. President is not just Chief Executive but Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, an anomaly that requires manifest personal authority, particularly during periods of global instability. Women politicians, routinely focused on social-welfare needs, must demonstrate greater involvement with international and military affairs.

  [Time.com, July 13, 2015]

  Second, the President has a ceremonial function, like that of the British royal family, in symbolically representing the history and prestige of the nation. Hence voters subliminally look for gravitas, an ancient term describing the laconic dignity of Roman senators. The President must project steadiness, sober reserve, and deliberative judgment. Many women, who tend to talk faster and smile more than men, have trouble with gravitas as performance art.

  Third, the complex, coast-to-coast primary system in the United States forces presidential candidates into well over a year of brutal competition for funding and grassroots support. Their lives are usurped by family-disrupting travel, stroking of rich donors, and tutelage by professional consultants and PR flacks. This exhausting, venal marathon requires enormous physical stamina and perhaps ethical desensitization to survive it.

  In contrast, many heads of state elsewhere ascend through their internal party structure. They are automatically elevated to Prime Minister when their party wins a national election. This parliamentary system of government has been far more favorable for the steady rise of women to the top.

  The protracted and ruthlessly gladiatorial U.S. electoral process drives talented women politicians away from the fray. What has kept women from winning the White House is not simple sexism but their own reluctance to subject themselves to the harsh scrutiny and ritual abuse of the presidential sweepstakes.

  For example, two eminently qualified and experienced Democrats never launched presidential campaigns when they could have over the past 25 years: Senator Dianne Feinstein, with her deep knowledge of defense and intelligence issues, and Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives and therefore the highest-ranking woman in U.S. history. Yet a marginal Democratic congressman like the boyish Dennis Kucinich had the ambition and moxie to mount two quixotic presidential bids in 2004 and 2008.

  Most of the American electorate has probably been ready for a woman president for some time. But that woman must have the right array of qualities and ideally have risen to prominence through her own talents and not (like Hillary Clinton or Argentina’s Executive President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner) through her marriage to a powerful man.

  What characteristics would be desirable in a woman president?

  She must find a happy middle ground between the trumpet-like triumphalism of Margaret Thatcher, Iron Lady of the Falklands War, and the swooning cult of personality of Evita Perón, dangling boons and bribes before the masses. She should show consistency of ideology, avoiding poll-driven flip-flops. How she manages her campaign signals her executive competence to run the labyrinthine federal bureaucracy.

  She must be statesmanlike, pursuing women’s progress withou
t playing victim or bashing men. She must deal forthrightly with the news media, a political reality since eighteenth-century Great Britain. In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro, the first female vice-presidential nominee of a major party, held a high-stakes, two-hour, no-holds-barred press conference that was a bravura display of tough, courageous candor. Alaska Governor Sarah Palin’s exuberant promise as a national figure was short-circuited by her thin-skinned inability to handle the hostile press. Current GOP candidate Carly Fiorina, though ultimately limited by her lack of government experience, is remarkably nimble in jousting with the media.

  Former Cabinet Secretary Elizabeth Dole’s bold GOP presidential run in 1999 was torpedoed by her too rote and chirpy Southern-belle delivery, leading to her withdrawal for lack of funding. Dianne Feinstein has a grande-dame gravitas as well as nerves of steel, demonstrated by her heroic composure after the 1978 massacre in San Francisco City Hall.

  But today’s best model for aspiring women politicians is German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who combines a take-charge persona with engaging spontaneity and zest for life. She is a soccer fan, an opera lover, and a home cook and gardener—a real person, not the prisoner in a gilded cage that our heavily guarded American presidents have become.

  34

  FEMINIST TROUBLE

  CAMILLE PAGLIA ASSESSES THE PARLOUS STATE OF TODAY’S FEMINISM

  INTERVIEW WITH ELLA WHELAN, SPIKED REVIEW

  It’s doubtful whether Camille Paglia—cultural critic, academic, and the author of several acclaimed books including, most recently, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars—has ever pulled a punch. Since she burst onto the cultural scene in the 1990s, following the publication of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson—as she put it, the “most X-rated academic book ever written”—Paglia has been a trenchant, principled voice in the Culture Wars, attacking, with one hand, the anti-sex illiberalism of her feminist peers, while, with the other, laying waste to the trendy, pomo relativism infecting the academy.

  [Spiked Review (U.K.), December 2015]

  Above all, Paglia, who some have called the anti-feminist feminist, has remained a staunch defender of individual freedom. She has argued against laws prohibiting pornography, drugs, and abortion. And, when political correctness was cutting a swathe through a host of institutions during the 1990s, she stood firmly on the side of free speech. So, what does she make of the political and cultural state of feminism today? What does she think of the revival of anti-sex sentiment among young feminists, their obsession with policing language, and their wholehearted embrace of victimhood? As Spiked’s Ella Whelan discovered, Paglia’s convictions burn as brightly as ever …

  ELLA WHELAN: On both sides of the Atlantic, feminism, especially on college campuses, appears to be undergoing a resurgence. As a long-term critic of political correctness, do you think today’s feminists are too focused on policing thought and speech?

  CAMILLE PAGLIA: After the ferocious Culture Wars of the 1980s to mid-1990s, feminism sank into a long period of relative obscurity. It was kept tangentially alive through scattered websites and blogs until it finally regained media visibility over the past five years, partly through splashy endorsements by pop figures like Beyoncé. The history of feminism has always been cyclic: after the suffrage movement gained the vote for women in Britain (1918 and 1928) and the United States (1920), feminist activism faded away. Forty years passed before second-wave feminism was launched by Betty Friedan, when she co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966.

  The problem with too much current feminism, in my opinion, is that even when it strikes progressive poses, it emanates from an entitled, upper-middle-class point of view. It demands the intrusion and protection of paternalistic authority figures to project a hypothetical utopia that will be magically free from offense and hurt. Its rampant policing of thought and speech is completely reactionary, a gross betrayal of the radical principles of 1960s counterculture, which was inaugurated in the United States by the incendiary Free Speech Movement at the University of California at Berkeley.

  I am continually shocked and dismayed by the nearly Victorian notions promulgated by today’s feminists about the fragility of women and their naive helplessness in asserting control over their own dating lives. Female undergraduates incapable of negotiating the oafish pleasures and perils of campus fraternity parties are hardly prepared to win leadership positions in business or government in the future.

  WHELAN: You’ve been critical of the likes of Gloria Steinem and Andrea Dworkin in the past. To what extent do you think the seeds for feminism’s current turn towards censorship were sown in the 1960s and 1970s?

  PAGLIA: Steinem, with her media-savvy aviator shades and blonde-streaked locks, pushed the far more pioneering Betty Friedan offstage to take charge of the nascent women’s movement in the United States. At the start, Steinem was great—she normalized the image of feminism and made it seem like a rational cause rather than the ravings of frigid sexual freaks. But, by the mid-1970s, Steinem was ruling the roost like the Stalinist politburo. Dissenting voices like mine in feminism were banned from her magazine, Ms., which became the glossy Pravda of the movement—anti-male, anti-sex, anti-pop. My wing of pro-sex feminism was driven underground and wouldn’t surface again nationally until the early 1990s. Steinem has always been a networking careerist, packaging herself as a saintly, self-sacrificing humanitarian while privately schmoozing with the rich and famous and the media elite. She told the world, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”—even while she was never without a man on the chic Manhattan party scene.

  The anti-porn crusader Andrea Dworkin (who died a decade ago) was a rabid fanatic, a self-destructive woman so consumed by her hatred of men that she tottered on the edge of psychosis. Dworkin and her puritanical henchman Catharine MacKinnon (born into wealth and privilege) were extremely powerful in the United States for a long time, culminating in the major media’s canonization of MacKinnon in a 1991 New York Times Magazine cover story.

  When I burst on the scene after the release of my first book in 1990, I attacked Dworkin and MacKinnon with all guns blazing. I am very proud of the role I played in defending free speech and helping the pro-sex wing of feminism to go public and eventually win its great victory over both Dworkin-MacKinnon and the priggish feminist establishment typified by Steinem. Hence the unthinking backward turn of current feminism toward censorship is appalling and tragic. Young feminists seem to have little sense of the crucial battles that were waged and won a quarter century ago.

  WHELAN: Speaking of a backward turn, young feminists today are obsessed with the idea of “rape culture.” Do you think that, as the idea of rape culture suggests, sexual violence is normalized?

  PAGLIA: “Rape culture” is a ridiculous term—mere gassy propaganda, too rankly bloated to critique. Anyone who sees sex so simplistically has very little sense of world history, anthropology, or basic psychology. I feel very sorry for women who have been seduced by this hyper-politicized, victim-centered rhetoric, because in clinging to such superficial, inflammatory phrases, they have renounced their own power and agency.

  WHELAN: Are you therefore concerned by the push for affirmative-consent or, as they’re otherwise known, “Yes means Yes” laws?

  PAGLIA: As I have repeatedly argued throughout my career, sex is a physical interaction, animated by primitive energies and instincts that cannot be reduced to verbal formulas. Neither party in any sexual encounter is totally operating in the rational realm, which is why the Greek god Dionysus was the patron of ecstasy, a hallucinatory state of pleasure-pain. “Yes means Yes” laws are drearily puritanical and literalistic as well as hopelessly totalitarian. Their increasing popularity simply demonstrates how boring and meaningless sex has become—and why Hollywood movies haven’t produced a scintilla of sexiness since Sharon Stone uncrossed her legs in Basic Instinct. Sex is always a dangerous gamble—as gay men have known and accepted for
thousands of years. Nothing in the world will ever be totally safe, even the plushy pads of an infant’s crib, to which feminist ideologues would evidently wish to reduce us all.

  WHELAN: What did you make of Chrissie Hynde’s recent assertion that she was at least partially responsible for her sexual assault at the hands of a biker gang when she was 21? Do you think that contemporary feminism is too quick to turn women into blameless victims?

  PAGLIA: I have been a Chrissie Hynde fan since her first albums with the Pretenders, but this scrappy controversy made my admiration for her go stratospheric. I adore her scathing process of self-examination and her bold language of personal responsibility—that is exactly the direction that feminism must take! Hynde (four years younger than me) is demonstrating the tough, no-crap attitude of the rebellious women of my 1960s generation, who were directly inspired by the sexual revolution, created by the brand-new Pill. We took all kinds of risks—I certainly did, with some scary escapes in dark side streets of Paris and Vienna. We wanted the same freedoms as men, and we took charge of our own destinies. We viewed life as a continual experiment, an urgent pressing into the unknown. If we got knocked down, we got up again, nursed our bruises, and learned from our mistakes. Today, in contrast, too many young feminists want their safety, security, and happiness guaranteed in advance by all-seeing, all-enveloping bureaucracies. It’s a sad, limited, and childish view of life that I find as claustrophobic as a hospital ward.

  WHELAN: What advice would you give young women today? Or do you think there is an advice overkill and we should be left alone to work things out for ourselves?

  PAGLIA: Each generation must create its own reality and find its own identity. If today’s young women want to be passive wards of the state, then that is their self-stultifying choice. One cannot impose a dynamic, expansive, metaphysical vision of existence on timid minds who crave the miniature, like porcelain bibelots of frogs and sparrows. My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself. We need more dissent and less dogma.