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Paglia, “Pop Shots: A brief, annotated, slightly wacky, wholly subjective guide to the most fabulous moments in fashion history,” New York magazine, February 24, 1997. Commentary on a photo gallery of stars, including Barbra Streisand, Jim Morrison, Françoise Hardy, Jane Fonda in Klute, Lauren Hutton, Diane Keaton, Donna Mills, Pat Benatar, Linda Evangelista, Sharon Stone, and En Vogue. Paglia: “Fashion is the glittering kaleidoscope of modern sexual personae. Ever since the industrial revolution raised the standard of living and expanded the options of middle-class women, fashion has provided dream visions of alternative selves that were once available only to the aristocracy….The finest fashion photography will certainly outlast most of what the traditional arts have produced in the past two decades of shallow irony and message-heavy agitprop….Fashion is a branch of the visual and performing arts. It is a glorious feast of color, form, dance, and gesture.”
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Stephen Holden, “On Black Films and Breezy Lesbians,” The New York Times, March 5, 1997. The Watermelon Woman, written and directed by Cheryl Dunyé, “a breezy, faux-cinéma-verité account of a black lesbian filmmaker researching the life of an obscure actress from the 1930s.” Among “several wonderful comic asides” is Camille Paglia “in a self-parodying cameo appearance as herself.”
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Paglia, “Happy and at Home in the Halfway House: American suburbia,” Arcadia column, Financial Times (U.K.), March 15–16, 1997. Describes the towering white and purple-black cumulus clouds of her childhood in upstate New York. “My youth in the snow belt has addicted me to weather, which I study and monitor as if it conveyed divine messages. When I stay too long in the city, I feel exiled from elemental realities. I must see the clouds and read their moods. And like my superstitious pagan ancestors, I uneasily scrutinize each phase of the moon.”
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Paglia, “The Big Night: The people cry out to the Academy gods: More cleavage and glitz! Less [Billy] Crystal!,” Salon.com, March 25, 1997. “Oh, memories of Oscar of yore!…At last the Oscars begin, and I go into my usual frenzy of fury at the short shrift given to the stars’ limousine-and-red-carpet arrival—a traditional, sacred ritual for which Angelenos begin lining up at dawn. Why the hell does the Academy think a billion people tune in around the globe?…Why in Dietrich’s name must we tolerate these endless shenanigans by smug, corny hosts?—at the expense of the stars who are the true raison d’être of the evening. I and every drag queen from Rome to Rio want to see gowns, gowns, and glamour! What’s the point of designers and jewelers lavishing all that luxury on nominees if we can’t see the bloody stuff in all its glory?”
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Ginia Bellafante, “Bewitching Teen Heroines: They’re all over the dial, speaking out, cracking wise and casting spells,” Time magazine, May 5, 1997. On popular new TV series like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which have succeeded “because they have avoided coming off as dramatized infomercials for the National Organization for Women.” Bellafante says the lead characters are “the product of a Camille Paglia feminism” based on “the very pragmatic idea that women can be smart and successful” while still embracing fashion and sex.
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Paglia, interviewer, “It All Comes Back to Family: At Home with Mario Puzo,” The New York Times, May 8, 1997. Paglia visits the 76-year-old author of The Godfather at his house in Bay Shore, New York.
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Paglia, “The Death of Diana, Princess of Wales: A gift wasted,” The Irish Times, September 6, 1997. Reprinted from Paglia’s two-part conversation with managing editor Andrew Ross in Salon.com: “From Huntress to Hunted,” August 31, and “They Destroyed Her,” September 2, 1997. Diana had died at 4:00 AM in Paris on August 31. Also appeared as “A Gift Diana Squandered” in The Guardian (U.K.). “She began to waste her enormous gift. At one point she had said a fulfilling job was better than a man to give your life meaning. I wish she had pursued that avenue, because she met a very tacky end—to die in the car of a gigolo playboy in flight from the Ritz.”
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Ros Wynne-Jones, interview, “The Goddess: Camille Paglia, the academic thinker, was the first to identify Diana’s divine symbolism,” The Independent on Sunday (U.K.), September 7, 1997. About the process of deification of “Diana the icon”: “The British have such a tradition of mediums and séances and haunted theaters, it can only be a matter of time before someone is cured by Diana.”
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“Paglia Takes on Feminist Philistines,” Page Six, The New York Post, September 9, 1997. Paglia to speak at a “Fetish for Freedom” fund-raiser for Feminists for Free Expression held at Mother, “a downtown dominatrix hangout” in Manhattan. Also on the program: Candida Royalle and Betty Dodson. “ ‘We’re the authentic spirit of women’s lib. We believe in laughter, sex, fun, music, and art,’ said Paglia. ‘The rest are prudes.’…Paglia’s least favorite feminist seems to be Susan Faludi, author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women—‘She has no culture. She’s a philistine.’ ”
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“Narrative Threads: Some women of note on the emotional significance of clothing,” Fashions of the Times supplement, The New York Times, Fall 1997. “What in your wardrobe are you most attached to—and why?” Among those polled: Helen Gurley Brown, Donna Karan, Ivana Trump, Wendy Wasserstein, Queen Latifah, and Cindy Sherman. Paglia replied: “My doctrine of Amazon feminism is best expressed by the fierce, buttery-soft black leather ankle boots that I bought in London in 1994 and debuted on the guerrilla cover photograph of my book Vamps & Tramps….I inherited an Italian reverence for the fine art of leather-working; my family, which emigrated from a region of Italy known for that trade, came to upstate New York to work in the Endicott-Johnson shoe factories.”
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“All Hail the Bitch Goddess: Camille Paglia and Glenn Belverio (The Artist Formerly Known as Glennda Orgasm) pay homage to the Queen of Camp, Jacqueline Susann,” a dialogue in honor of the re-release of Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls (1966) by Grove Press, Salon.com, November 17, 1997. GB: “It’s about time that tribute is being paid to Jacqueline Susann, because so much of pop culture is informed by what she did.” CP: “For me, Valley of the Dolls, like Auntie Mame, is one of the great books of the postwar era. There are very few so-called ‘serious’ novels following World War Two that mean anything to me. I just don’t identify at all with any of those major heavy-hitters of fiction—Bellow, Malamud, Grass, Pynchon, and so on.”
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John Strausbaugh and Queen Itchie, interview, “The Lesbionic Woman: Camille Paglia Speaks. We Listen,” cover story, The New York Press, November 26–December 2, 1997. Attacks the current leftist press in New York for political correctness, above all the Village Voice, which she read “religiously” in the 1960s and ’70s but which was now “an empty shell of itself” and “an apologist for the academic establishment,…taking the side of the tenured professors of Harvard, Yale, Princeton against an outside voice like mine….In the ’60s it was like ‘Show us the weird books, show us the odd things. We want the thing that destroys everything we’ve experienced so far.’ Kafka said, ‘A book should be an ax for the frozen sea within us.’ I came out of a period when eccentricity was glorified and going your own way was glorified….The idea that a [post-structuralist] ‘theorist’ is an intellectual—a theorist is the opposite of an intellectual. A theorist is a fundamentalist, the equivalent of a fundamentalist Christian from the Bible Belt.”
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Joanna Coles, interview, “Enter the Amazon,” The Guardian (U.K.), November 27, 1997. “She is America’s most famous social philosopher, the anti-feminist feminist, the agent provocateur of academe.” “ ‘I’m an equity feminist,’ she shouts above the restaurant clatter. ‘I want equality for women in the eyes of the law, but I oppose special protections—they’re reactionary….I worry about the kids today, the shrinking down of the cultural
scene. There’s too much irony now, everything’s cool and people are afraid to be enthusiastic. In the Sixties, we were not afraid to make fools of ourselves. I’m always blundering! I’m always saying too much, knocking things over!’ ”
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Edward J. Sozanski, “Museum canvasses area personalities for anniversary exhibition,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, December 3, 1997. “The Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts opens ‘Philadelphia’s Choice,’ paintings and sculptures chosen from the museum’s permanent collection [in its storage vault] by 17 area residents.” “Paglia picked three military portraits”: Philip Alexius de László’s General John J. Pershing, Thomas Sully’s Major Thomas Biddle, and “a sword-bearing figure in a kimono called Fantasie by Charles Sprague Pearce.” Quoted from Paglia’s statement: “Military portraits, beginning with David’s paintings of Napoleon, have inspired me since childhood. In my classification of sexual personae, they are glamorous Apollonian icons of the Western will to power.”
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Jenn Shreve, interview, “Animal House: Camille Paglia comments on the sexual politics of the Clinton White House,” Salon.com, January 22, 1998. Shreve: “People are alleging that the president is a sex addict—is this true?” Paglia: “First of all, I want to get on the record that I am a Clinton supporter in political terms. But I was probably the only leading feminist to have believed Paula Jones from the start—from the very moment she emerged in 1994. I felt that the charges that Anita Hill made were far less grave than the ones Paula Jones made against Clinton….
“So I don’t think his problem is sex addiction but just a normal, rather immature man’s desire to be petted. He sure doesn’t get the petting he needs from Hillary. Hillary got him to the White House, but she doesn’t pet him. The moment his daughter is gone—and here’s one of his most shameless appeals for popular approval—out comes the dog! He even walked out with the dog yesterday. That’s the most pathetic part of this. He’s desperate for a woman who will pet him and instead he gets a dog!”
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Paul Johnson and Camille Paglia, “The Epic Film Titanic Hits Our Screens and Poses an Important Question About Our Values Today: Would we still put women and children first in the lifeboats?,” The Daily Mail (U.K.), January 24, 1998 (the day after Titanic opened). Johnson says yes, and Paglia says no. Paglia: “At the very moment women were agitating for the right to vote in order to enter the political arena with men, an archaic standard was invoked on the Titanic that placed women in a special protected class….If I were captain of a sinking ocean liner with too few lifeboats, I would assign places to younger people first, without respect to gender. By what logic do we prevent the death of an elderly woman, for example, while consigning to the watery depths a young man who has not yet tasted a full life?”
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Paglia, Salon.com column, February 3, 1998. Response to reader question about Bill Clinton’s “sexual appetite”: “Exactly what drives Clinton’s appetites? Fatherless, he was reared in matriarchy. He reveres women but fears their all-engulfing power. His feisty, florid, ribald mother Virginia—so strong that even the dominatrix Barbra Streisand fell under her influence—would be succeeded by her rival and opposite, the male-willed Hillary Rodham, a fanatically focused, high-minded Puritan who took Bill under her wing as a lovable but ever-straying son, whom she molds like clay but can’t control outside her atelier.
“Clinton’s crimes are incestuous: he makes the whole world his family and then seduces and pollutes it, person by person. Remember how then Governor Clinton, hot and sweaty from jogging, jovially stained Jim McDougal’s expensive new leather chair?—something his Whitewater partner never forgot….Clinton is a tactile, not a phallic president. His favorite gropes are at funerals, where he can give long, warm, tearful bear hugs to endless lines of ladies without scandal. He needs Hillary to structure him and give him spine, or he’d melt into a butter puddle of lip-smacking schmooziness. Look at how inept he was in reintroducing his yappy new puppy to the affronted presidential cat on the White House lawn after the last family vacation. ‘Hillary will deal with that naughty dog!’ I muttered peevishly.”
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Paglia, “A Call for Lustiness: Just say no to the sex police,” Time magazine, cover story on Paula Jones’ charges against Bill Clinton, March 23, 1998. “Liberal Democrats, who supported Anita Hill against Clarence Thomas in 1991, are waking up to the police state that their rigid rules have created.”
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Paglia, “Camille Does the Oscars: Winslet blooms, Madonna clunks, Stone styles: A Paglia’s-eye-view of the Academy Awards,” Salon.com, March 24, 1998. “Kate Winslet of Titanic is truly titanic in her magnificent green dress, which makes her look like the Grand Duchess Anastasia at a medieval tournament. She should get the Oscar for best bust. Anyone with those floaters doesn’t need a lifeboat. I thought we’d gotten rid of Meg Ryan, but no, there she is bounding chirpily down the red carpet with her new face tucks and a skin sheen as blinding as a Maine lighthouse. God, she revolts me. Cher hoves into sight wearing what seems to be a beige lampshade cut like a tornado eggbeater on her head. Not exactly widow’s weeds. She sure got over Sonny’s death fast.”
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Paglia, “The Feminist Fault Line on Clinton,” The Boston Sunday Globe, March 29, 1998. “The recent allegations of sexual misconduct swirling around President Clinton have driven feminist leaders such as Gloria Steinem and Patricia Ireland, president of the National Organization for Women, to desperate contortions of twisted logic….As a registered Democrat who twice voted for Clinton (and who is deeply troubled by his private behavior toward women), I have long opposed the backstage collusion of feminist leaders with the superstructure of the Democratic party.”
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Bruce Handy, The Viagra Craze, cover story, Time magazine, May 4, 1998. Paglia: “The erection is the last gasp of modern manhood.”
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Paglia, “A Stranger in the Night: Camille Paglia on Frank Sinatra and his women,” The Guardian (U.K.), May 19, 1998 (after Sinatra’s death). “Women allured but remained a conundrum to him….Like many Latin Catholic men, he seems to have suffered from the Madonna-whore complex….The only woman who broke Sinatra’s heart, however, was the Southern spitfire Ava Gardner, who shared his taste for indefatigable, boozing nightlife….If Ava resembled anyone in Western history, it was Clodia, the glamorous, fast-track Roman aristocrat whom the poet Catullus accused of treachery and promiscuity. ‘I hate and I love!’ cried Catullus, in the agony of humiliation.”
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Paglia, “Judy Garland as a Force of Nature,” The New York Times, June 14, 1998. Calls Garland “a personality on the grand scale who makes our current crop of pop stars look lightweight and evanescent.” Discusses Garland’s “wavering between male and female timbres” as evidence that “singing was her search for gender.” This article was reprinted in the book enclosed in a Judy Garland four-CD box set and video, released by 32 Records in October 1998.
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Paglia, “Making Marilyn of Monica: She displays ’90s confusion of youth,” The Boston Sunday Globe, June 14, 1998. Splashy spread of California beach photos of Monica Lewinsky by Herb Ritts in Vanity Fair. States that Lewinsky was “exploited for back-door, mechanical sexual servicing by the most powerful politician in the world” and “never accorded the honor or the benefits of a real mistress.” Lewinsky “is not atypical of affluent American girls” today, “alternately blank and manipulative, insecure and aggressive.” They have been “overprotected by peace and prosperity” and “seem removed from reality”: “the horrors of history happened to someone else.”
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Paglia, “Spellbound by Beauty,” The Daily Telegraph (U.K.), June 27, 1998. “Alfred Hitchcock has been accused of treating female characters—and his leading ladies—badly. Camille Paglia says he was misunderstood.” Excerpt from cover story in W,
The Waterstone’s Magazine. Reprinted in The Globe and Mail, August 21, 1998.
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Ginia Bellafante, “Feminism: It’s all about me!,” Time magazine cover story, June 29, 1998. Cover headline, “Is Feminism Dead?,” with hovering heads of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Ally McBeal (Calista Flockhart). “Ally McBeal and Bridget Jones are the products of what could be called the Camille Paglia syndrome. In her landmark 1990 book, Sexual Personae, author Paglia used intellect to analyze art, history, and literature from classical times to the nineteenth century and argue that it is men who are the weaker sex.”
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Paglia, “Hitch’s Women” (on Alfred Hitchcock), cover story, W, The Waterstone’s Magazine (U.K.), 14, Summer 1998.
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“The Hitchcock House of Horrors: The mother, the shower, the knife,” The Guardian, July 17, 1998. Roundtable of writers and movie stars about Hitchcock’s Psycho. Paglia: “I was a schoolgirl in Syracuse, New York, when Psycho came out. It was a turning point for an entire generation….The 1950s in America were very stable, very conformist, and the movie was a terrorizing break in the security of that era….There had been horror films, ghost stories like The House on Haunted Hill, but never on this level….Now that we look back, we can see Hitchcock was a prophet, that he was seeing something about to happen in the 1960s….Psycho wasn’t taken seriously by the critics….That moment was a high point of European art cinema, so compared to statements made by Bergman or Antonioni, it seemed like a vulgar potboiler. And over time, we realize that Hitchcock’s works have lasted. Young people have no feeling for those great art films, which don’t have the staying power. But Alfred Hitchcock goes on and on.”
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