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John Dugdale, “Feuds Corner: Susan Sontag vs. Camille Paglia,” The Sunday Times (U.K.), April 16, 1995. Sontag about Paglia in 1993: “She should go join a rock band. Are people impressed by this shamelessness? We used to think Norman Mailer was bad, but she makes Mailer look like Jane Austen. The vindictiveness, the vulgarity, the aggression—she is repulsive to me.” Dugdale cites “the hilarious essay ‘Sontag, Bloody Sontag’ ” in Paglia’s just-published Vamps & Tramps.
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Judith Newman, “These Boots Apparently Think They’re the Energizer Bunny,” The New York Times, April 16, 1995. Interview with Nancy Sinatra about her posing at age 54 for the May issue of Playboy magazine. Sinatra says, “As a feminist, I feel very good about being my age and doing this. But I’m with Camille Paglia on this whole issue. Saying Playboy exploits women is like saying the Metropolitan Museum of Art exploits women, as far as I’m concerned. What’s wrong with beautiful pictures of the nude female body?”
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“Camille Paglia: A wild interview,” The Playboy Interview, Playboy, May 1995. Cover story and centerfold: “Nancy Sinatra: She Does It Her Way.”
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Amy Fine Collins, “Fashion’s Footman,” profile of shoe designer Manolo Blahnik, Vanity Fair, May 1995. Blahnik: “And Camille Paglia. I read her book in the hospital. She’s my American fantasy. That woman is fire!”
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Paglia, “On Nudity,” Last Word column, The Advocate, May 2, 1995.
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UB Reporter, State University of New York at Buffalo, May 4, 1995. Paglia opens “Fiedler Fest” at the Center for the Arts, celebrating Buffalo’s “resident literary intellectual Leslie Fiedler, the Samuel L. Clemens Professor of English.” Paglia described how a radical student leader at Harpur College denounced her for going to Yale: “He said, ‘If you’re going on to grad school, there’s only one place to go—Buffalo.’ ” Fiedler and other radical thinkers on the faculty made UB “the Alexandria of the ’60s for student radicals,” Paglia said. Citing Plato’s theory of intellectual procreation, she called herself “a child of Leslie Fiedler and proud of it.” Paglia described her admiration of Fiedler when, as a graduate student, she attended his talk at Yale about the future of literary studies and was outraged that the entire English department faculty boycotted the event.
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“In This Corner…,” San Jose Mercury News, May 30, 1995. “Don’t put Gloria Steinem and Camille Paglia in the same room. Asked about alleged anti-feminist Paglia in the latest Interview magazine, classic feminist Steinem began by comparing her to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as ‘someone who was helped by a movement they weren’t a part of, but then discovered they could be rewarded for opposing it.’ Steinem says she considers Paglia worse than Thomas because Paglia blames women for their problems. And she said Paglia is even worse than arch-conservative Pat Robertson. At least ‘he knows what the women’s movement is doing.’ ”
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Paglia, “Sex in the Classroom,” Last Word column, The Advocate, June 27, 1995. Pull quote: “Sex must be liberated from preachers of the Left as well as preachers of the Right.”
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Claudia Roth Pierpont, “Twilight of the Goddess,” profile of Ayn Rand, The New Yorker, July 24, 1995. Full-page photo of Rand by Arnold Newman with caption: “The Camille Paglia of the early sixties: Rand, wearing her signature pin, in 1964.”
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Dominic Wells, “Boys Keep Swinging,” interview with David Bowie and Brian Eno, Time Out (London), August 23–30, 1995. Bowie: “I nearly sampled Camille Paglia on this album, but she never returned my calls! She kept sending messages through her assistant saying, ‘Is this really David Bowie, and if it is, is it important?’ [laughs], and I just gave up! So I replaced her line with me.” Eno: “Sounds pretty much like her.” [Paglia considers this 1994 incident one of the major fiascos of her career. Her New York publisher conveyed a message that had been left for her: “David Bowie wants your telephone number.” Paglia burst out laughing and hooted, “Oh, right! David Bowie wants my phone number! That takes the cake!” Despite repeated urging from her publisher, Paglia refused to take it seriously and assumed it was a hoax. It was not until many years afterward that she stumbled on this Bowie interview on the Web and was utterly horrified. Much later, when she was doing columns for Interview magazine, editor-in-chief Ingrid Sischy mentioned that she would be seeing Bowie at a Hamptons party that weekend. Paglia related the entire saga and begged her to convey Paglia’s consternation and profound apologies to Bowie.]
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Virginia Postrel, interview, “Interview with the Vamp: Why Camille Paglia hates affirmative action, defends Rush Limbaugh, and respects Ayn Rand,” Reason, August/September 1995. Reprinted in Feminist Interpretations of Ayn Rand (1999), ed. Mimi Reisel Gladstein and Chris Matthew Sciabarra.
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Paglia, review, Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality by Andrew Sullivan, The Washington Post Book World, September 10, 1995.
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Laura Ziv, “Tough Your Way to the Top,” Marie Claire, September 1995. “Players are also those people who make it through the school of hard knocks. ‘You’ve got to be able to take things on the chin,’ says the fierce and iconoclastic Camille Paglia. ‘There’s no way to climb up the ladder without taking the negatives that go along with success—like criticism, envy, and sabotage.’ ”
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Constitution Hall, ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), America Online auditorium event, September 19, 1995. Paglia (at home) replies to live online questions, moderated by Phil Gutis, national media relations director of the ACLU. Gutis: “Alright, I’ll open with the first question: Why in the world, Camille, did you choose the screen name Volsci?” Paglia: “The Volscians were the fiercest tribe in ancient Italy. My mother was born in that region. Vergil named his great [Volscian] Amazon warrior in the Aeneid ‘Camilla’ and the name has been in my family for generations.”
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Paglia, “Learning to Hit: The unbridled muscularity of Texas football could teach simpering females something about defending their turf,” Texas Business magazine, October 1995. Of legendary Dallas Cowboys quarterback Roger Staubach: “I thought Staubach was sensational—a focused, intense, true leader as well as a sharp passer and nifty runner. His years as a naval officer gave Staubach class, but he could flare up with populist verve. Stabbing his finger in the faces of sidelined Los Angeles Rams, he once shouted, ‘We’ll see you [bleep, bleep] chokers in the playoffs!’ That’s my kind of guy.”
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Letters to the editor, The New Republic, November 13, 1995. Paglia praises Naomi Wolf’s “courageous essay” on the ethics of abortion (“Our Bodies, Our Souls,” October 16) as an important contribution to “the reform movement within feminism.”
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Paglia, interviewer, “Howard Stern: The Advocate Interview,” cover story, The Advocate, November 28, 1995.
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Paglia, “Angels on Our Shoulder,” Allure, December 1995. Paglia’s “fantasy script” for Charlie’s Angels (long condemned as sexist by feminists): “The Angels go undercover at a Mississippi women’s prison….Kelly, in a hairnet and décolleté white smock, blends in with the cafeteria staff to serve creamed chipped beef on toast points to shuffling lines of sullen inmates….After earthquakes and a mudslide drop metropolitan Los Angeles into the sea, the Angels shrug philosophically and set off for New York City, where they go undercover in a disco.”
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Paglia, “The Good Witch,” tribute to recently deceased Elizabeth Montgomery, The New York Times Magazine, December 31, 1995. “As Samantha Stephens, the witch-turned-suburban-housewife in Bewitched [ABC TV, 1964–72], Elizabeth Montgomery, a sunny, spunky, vaguely tomboyish blonde, was a transition from Doris Day, the marriage-minded virgin of 1950s movies to Mary Tyler Mo
ore, the independent but vulnerable career woman of 1970s television.”
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Paglia, “The First Drag Queen,” article on Hillary Clinton commissioned for Salon.com, January 28, 1996. Reprinted as “America’s First Drag Queen: Camille Paglia on the Enigma of Hillary Clinton,” cover story, Friday Review, The Guardian (U.K.), February 2, 1996. The New Republic then requested an expansion of the article for a cover-story package on Hillary. That article, “Ice Queen, Drag Queen: A psychological biography,” was published to great controversy on March 4, 1996, under the general cover headline, “Hillary Unmasked.” It juxtaposes Hillary’s cheery Christmas TV tour of the White House (with its surprise gingerbread replica of her childhood home and oddly exposed bedroom) with her arrival at a federal court building to testify under subpoena before a grand jury: “She is wearing, quite improbably, a long black velvet coat trimmed with royalist gold brocade….Then, like Mary Queen of Scots on her way to the scaffold, she sweeps away for her grueling four-hour rendezvous with independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr.” Paglia connects Hillary’s college nickname, “Sister Frigidaire,” to the snowman that Hillary spontaneously describes (on the Christmas TV tour) on the Rodham front lawn—“the only one that never melted till spring.” “What we see in the present, superbly poised First Lady is a consummate theatrical artifact whose stages of self-development from butch to femme were motivated by unalloyed political ambition. She is the drag queen of modern politics, a bewitching symbol of professional women’s sometimes confused search for identity in this era of unlimited options.” Reprinted by The Independent Monthly (Australia), June 1996.
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Paglia, review, Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of Time—and Others Don’t by Gary Taylor, The Washington Post Book World, April 7, 1996.
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Gerry Kroll, Ab Fab Gab, cover story on Jennifer Saunders and Joanne Lumley, The Advocate, April 16, 1996. Paglia asked about their hit TV series, Absolutely Fabulous: “Every kind of liberal piety is spat upon. I think it is absolutely a gay male sensibility. Edina and Patsy represent the gay male idea of life, based on pleasure and enjoyment and satisfying the appetites of the flesh. What I adore about Absolutely Fabulous is the wickedly malicious humor, the over-the-top high camp that is the distinguishing mark of the gay male world.”
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Karen Springen, “The Biology of Beauty: What science has discovered about sex appeal,” cover story, Newsweek, June 3, 1996. Roundtable of feminists (including Naomi Wolf) and scholars. Paglia: “I am delighted by the recent resurgence in evolutionary biology, which is forcing science back onto the feminist agenda, where it has been disgracefully absent. We are half-animal beings, driven by instinctual forces that we can only dimly know. Science is our best hope of understanding the strange alchemy of lust that so disrupts our social lives. Supreme moments in the history of civilization, as in ancient Egypt, classical Athens or Renaissance Florence, were always accompanied by the worship of beauty. Feminism is shot through with puritanical Judeo-Christian assumptions, which exalt the soul over the body and moralistically devalue the physical realm. Today the human hunger for beauty is satisfied by the much maligned fashion magazines, which are glorious art for the masses.”
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“Guitar World Presents: ‘All That Glitters’: 25 Years of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ ” ed. Tom Gogola. “Camille Paglia Decodes the Majestically Incomprehensible Lyrics of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ ” (a tart line-by-line commentary). Special supplement, “Free Led Zep Mini Mag” in plastic bag packaged with June 1996 issue of Guitar World: “A celebration of the mother of all classic rock songs, with interviews, an in-depth lesson, lyric analysis, and more.”
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David Sheff, interview, “Camille Paglia: Fame & Lust on the Net,” Yahoo! Internet Life magazine, September 1996. Cover line: “Camille Paglia’s Net Rant.” Pull quote: “The Internet was crucial to my success.” “Right after Sexual Personae came out, I was speaking, and someone asked if I knew I was all over The WELL. I didn’t even know what The WELL was. He sent me reams of material reprinted from there—intelligent, serious discussion based on my writings and lectures. I was flabbergasted. Someone from Boston was discussing my work with someone from Tennessee with someone in California. The established media were ignoring me, threatened by my ideas, but the people in cyberspace were devouring them, analyzing them, debating them….It happened because of the kind of thinking in Sexual Personae, a book that is like cyberspace. The book is a reflection of the way the Internet’s collective mind works. Ideas are exchanged at a million miles an hour, and every conceivable connection is made—from TV sitcoms to David Bowie to McLuhan to Cindy Crawford….I consider myself the first Internet intellectual.”
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Paglia, “Designing Men,” Last Word column, The Advocate, September 3, 1996. “A persistent libel says gay fashion designers hate women and want to mock them….The idea runs implicitly through Susan Faludi’s poisonous attack on Christian Lacroix” in Backlash.
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Paglia, live chat with reader questions for George Magazine Online, sponsored by AOL.com, September 11, 1996. (Paglia was replying from home.) “Question: What do you think is the cause of the increased incidence of male impotence? ProfCP: Men are shrinking, I’ve told you all this a thousand times! When will you wake up? Testosterone needs encouragement in order to operate at peak intensity! This is why my third bestseller, Vamps & Tramps, opened with a celebration of the penis!…
“Question: Is John F. Kennedy, Jr. [co-founder and editor-in-chief of George] as good-looking in person as in print? ProfCP: I have to say that he is an Adonis—and I have never used the term in my life—I mean, aside from referring to the real Adonis of Greek antiquity, of course. His skin is the most beautiful dusky color—it’s the Bouvier heritage, probably. And he was so nice, it was unbelievable.”
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Paglia, “Risqué Business: It’s Frederick’s of Hollywood’s 50th birthday this month, and the catalog is still required reading,” Los Angeles Magazine, October 1996.
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Paglia, “Hats Off to Classic Rock,” Guitar World, November 1996.
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Paglia, front-page review, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, Volume One 1500–1800, by Olwen Hufton, The Washington Post Book World, November 17, 1996.
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Paglia, “Amelia Earhart: The Lady Vanishes,” in “Heroine Worship: Inventing an Idolatry in the Age of Female Icons: A special issue,” The New York Times Magazine, November 24, 1996.
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Karl French, Screen Violence: An Anthology (1996), interview with Paglia about violence in popular culture.
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“Can You Take Some Advice, Kid?,” LIFE magazine, photo portfolio by Brian Lanker of public figures with their mentors, December 1996. Includes Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams, Cissy Houston and daughter Whitney Houston, Harold Bloom and Paglia. Bloom calls Paglia “self-begotten—Camille mentored herself.” Photos of Paglia humorously harassing Bloom from behind on a couch backed by a wall of books at his New York town house.
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Paglia, “The Internet & Sexual Personae,” Forbes ASAP magazine, December 2, 1996. “I owe the Internet a lot. It is significant that my arrival on the scene coincided with a sudden leap forward in the availability of this technology….The Internet, totally unknown to me, was spreading my ideas nationwide along a grapevine of dissenters and freethinkers who were tired of both the rigidities of American politics (then stuck in a sterile liberal-versus-conservative mode) and the censorship and conformism on campus and in feminism. My libertarian philosophy, as well as my pro-sex, pro-art, pro-popular culture positions, struck a chord with the radical individualists and space cowboys who were the pioneers of the Net. This is an excellent example of how the new personalized technology has broken the tyranny o
f the East Coast literary and media establishment. Ideas can no longer be controlled by an incestuous elite or the accidents of geography….The long effort by feminist zealots to ban the porn trade has failed. The Internet proves that the sexual imagination cannot be policed: shut it down in one place, and it will bubble up somewhere else.”
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“For immediate release: New column by Camille Paglia debuts in Salon,” press release from Salon, January 8, 1997: “Intellectual flame-thrower Camille Paglia launches a new column in Salon (www.salonmagazine.com) on Monday, January 13, editor David Talbot announced today….‘We’re excited about providing Camille Paglia a regular forum on the Internet—a medium that is perfectly suited for her slashing and uncompromising style,’ said Talbot. ‘Paglia cuts through encrusted thinking on the right, left and center….Paglia has written several features for Salon, including a passionate defense of TV talk shows that appeared in the Web site’s debut issue [“Talking Trash: In Defense of TV Talk Shows,” November 12, 1995]….Salon was recently named the Number One Web site of 1996 by Time magazine.”
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