Provocations

by Camille Paglia

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  “Stan Knows Best,” American Dad, Fox Broadcasting Company animated TV series, Season 1, Episode 3, aired May 8, 2005. Stan’s daughter Hayley is brusquely told by her dictatorial Women’s Studies professor at Groff Community College that she cannot attend school without paying her full tuition bill. Hayley takes a job as a waitress serving beer at a strip club. “At least I’m not being exploited like these poor strippers,” she says to the woman bartender. “Exploited?,” the gravel-voiced bartender retorts. “These girls are being empowered.” “Yeah, right,” Hayley replies. “Think about it,” the bartender goes on: “All they do is show their breasts, and men hand over hundreds of their hard-earned dollars. Who’s really being exploited here?” A bespectacled guy slouching over a beer at the other end of the bar pipes up, “Plus, to quote Camille Paglia, these ladies are sexual conquerors controlling the channel between nature and culture. [shouts across room] Take it off, bitch!” Hayley [meditatively]: “Camille Paglia, huh…?” When Stan unexpectedly turns up for lunch at the strip club, Hayley, sporting a cowgirl outfit in her new persona of “Dusty,” waltzes onstage whirling a lasso and ripping her halter top off to the cheers of the crowd.

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  Cathy Horyn, “The Sweet Smell of Celebrity: Star perfumes are giving a jolt to a business that has known some dismal years,” The New York Times, June 30, 2005. Color cartoons by Matt Collins of various fantasy perfumes. The “PAGLIA” perfume atomizer is a black, formidably spiked, high-heeled dominatrix boot standing next to its heavily zipped and buckled case, labeled “SCRATCH SNIFF SNEER” (parodying Paglia’s new book title, Break, Blow, Burn, a line from a John Donne poem).

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  “Passions,” Philadelphia magazine, July 2005. On-site photos of the hobbies of high-profile Philadelphians. Paglia says her hobby is the Hollywood film, The Philadelphia Story (1940), which she has watched “hundreds of times”: “And I still find it mesmerizing. It’s such a magical version of gracious living, in an ideal harmony of art and nature.” Here Paglia is impersonating Elizabeth Imbrie, the tart-tongued photographer who accompanies Macaulay Connor on a secret mission for Spy magazine to the Main Line mansion of Tracy Lord, which was modeled on the Merion house behind Paglia. Full-page photo of Paglia in combat-like paparazzo mode wielding a small camera (duplicating Imbrie’s classic Argus C3 rangefinder) on the manicured Lower Merion lawn.

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  Paglia, “The Thinking Woman’s Women: Radio 4’s ‘Greatest Philosophers’ poll yielded an all-male Top 20. But is philosophy really a female-free zone? On the contrary, insists Camille Paglia,” The Independent (U.K.), July 14, 2005. “Philosophy has shrunk in reputation and stature—it’s an academic exercise….The thinker of modern times should be partly abstract and partly practical….Today’s lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy. Philosophy as traditionally practiced may be a dead genre.”

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  Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, “Acrostic,” The New York Times Magazine, July 24, 2005. Paglia and the title of her study of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds are an acrostic, whose filled pattern is a quote from her book: “After shooting had finished, most birds were released. However, fifty crows refused to leave the studio lot and perched near Hitchcock’s bungalow. They soiled his car until the tree they were roosting in was cut down.”

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  Paglia, interviewer, “Joni Mitchell: Interview,” Interview magazine, August 2005. Paglia talks with Mitchell after celebrating her lyric for “Woodstock” in the final chapter in Break, Blow, Burn, a study of poetry starting with Shakespeare.

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  Paglia, “Guardsmen’s Deaths Strike at the Heart of America: Their units doubtless had a powerful sense of mission. But it is difficult for me to understand what they died for,” The Independent (U.K.), August 27, 2005. Paglia condemns “misuse and abuse” of the National Guard by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld after seven Pennsylvania National Guardsmen are killed in four days in Iraq. Sidebar: Photo of Madonna wearing a sling after breaking her hand, collarbone, and three ribs after falling from a horse at her British country estate. Paglia is quoted from elsewhere criticizing Madonna for her “disrespectful use of horses as props and fashion statements,” as on the August cover of Vogue.

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  Paglia, review, The First Poets: Lives of the Ancient Greek Poets by Michael Schmidt, The New York Times Book Review, August 28, 2005.

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  Paglia, “Hurricane Katrina Has Demolished This Administration’s Mask of Confidence,” The Independent (U.K.), September 3, 2005. “Hurricane Katrina is simply the latest chapter in the epic of American nature. It is a subject that Europeans rarely show understanding of in their often dismissive comments on U.S. culture….American history is crammed with tales of fortitude in the face of hostile geography and punishing weather, from the struggle of the Mayflower Puritans to survive their first New England winter to the desperate march of pioneers in the 1849 California gold rush through the baking desert of Death Valley.”

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  Amy S. Rosenberg, “The Cosmo Girl at 40,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, September 7, 2005. “When Cosmo Took the Plunge: Helen Gurley Brown shook things up when she put her sexy imprint on Cosmopolitan, now marking 40 years of the Cosmo Girl and her cleavage.” Paglia [rejecting early feminist attacks on Brown’s magazine]: “It was new, it was radical. So much has become Cosmopolitanized, it’s hard to recover how original it was….The Cosmo Girl was an embodiment of personal freedom….It’s an Amazonian beauty. They look armored. They’re like galleons in full sail—Elizabethan. They dominate men. They have great savoir faire—a sense of poise. They’re seductive. There’s an active energy that they always projected. Nothing masochistic, nothing vulnerable about them.”

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  Paglia, “Dancing as Fast as She Can: Madonna cannibalizes herself in a misguided attempt to appeal to today’s youth,” Salon.com, December 2, 2005. Paglia registers disappointment with Madonna’s new album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, whose evocation of 1970s disco music (revived by Madonna at her debut in the ’80s) is flat and uninspired. Includes “Camille Paglia’s Disco Playlist,” 116 of her most highly recommended songs from soul and funk to disco (1960s–1980s).

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  Paglia, “The Rise and Fall of T.O.: Terrell Owens enjoyed mythical status in America’s toughest sports town.” On the controversial Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver. Salon.com, December 14, 2005. Paglia also wrote a cover story on Owens for Philadelphia magazine, February 2005.

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  Roundtable, “Feminist Writers Pay Tribute to Betty Friedan” (after her death), The Guardian (U.K.), February 7, 2006. Paglia: “Simone de Beauvoir kept the feminist flame alive after women won the right to vote. Betty Friedan was a pragmatic facilitator who re-created the political organization of the suffrage movement. But Friedan did not, as has been repeatedly claimed, inspire an entire generation of women to ambition and achievement. Those forces were well launched before she published her first book in 1963. Friedan did not create Germaine Greer, nor did she create me. Women in the wake of the sexual revolution rebelled flamboyantly in the 1960s. The women’s movement was one strand that emerged from that decade; it was never the whole story. And with her defiant personal history and epic overview of art and politics, Greer remains for me far more central a figure than Friedan.”

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  Paglia, “Academic, Heal Thyself,” The New York Times, March 6, 2006. Starts: “What went wrong at Harvard?” Postmortem following the resignation of Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers after charges of sexism. Paglia criticizes Summers’ “strategic blunders” as well as the “ideological groupthink” and “insularity and excesses” of Harvard faculty, and she condemns the “climate of persecution and extortion around gender issues” on American campuses. “Corruption and cronyism became systemic” in the past three decades of pos
t-structuralism and postmodernism.

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  Paglia, “Journey to Art,” Gay America Guide, Winter/Spring 2006. “Five major works of art in the United States that every gay man and woman should have on their radar.” Paglia’s choices: Bronzino, Portrait of a Young Man; Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lady Lilith; Rosa Bonheur, The Horse Fair; Jamie Wyeth, Draft Age; Andy Warhol, Kitchen (film).

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  Lois E. Beckett, “Paglia Pans Education at the Ivy League,” The Harvard Crimson, April 12, 2006. “Offending feminists and conservatives alike, Paglia has defined her own political territory….But lambasting higher education—especially at Harvard—seems to have a special place in her heart.” Paglia asserts “a very rapid decline in the quality of the humanities” taught in the Ivy League. She says that when she meets recent graduates, “I am shocked at how little they know and what little cultural sense they have.”

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  Robin Abcarian, “Face Up to the Perky: Katie Couric can’t escape the adjective. Some say it’s descriptive. Others call it sexist,” The Los Angeles Times, April 15, 2006. “Katie Couric, who is leaving NBC to join CBS, is becoming the first sole female anchor of a nightly network newscast in September.” Paglia argues that “gravitas” is real and that many women have possessed it: Simone de Beauvoir, Lillian Hellman, Ayn Rand, Toni Morrison, and Dianne Feinstein. Paglia: “Women, if they ever expect to ascend to the presidency and be commander in chief, had better learn what ‘gravitas’ is and stop blowing it off as some sort of backlash word.” Paglia says Couric is indeed both perky and “girly.” About Couric, who interviewed her during a 1994 book tour, Paglia says, “I found her pleasant but weightless, depthless. Backstage in the green room, she said to me with a look of wonderment in her eyes, ‘But Camille, why do you say all those controversial things when you know you will be criticized?’ I was dumbfounded.”

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  Paglia, “Mercurial Girl,” Rolling Stone 1,000th Commemorative Issue, Rolling Stone magazine, May 18–June 1, 2006. Paglia was asked to comment on Steven Meisel’s “Flesh and Fantasy” portfolio of Madonna, published in Rolling Stone in 1991. Paglia calls it “a tribute to Brassai”: “In the lacquered hard glamour of Meisel’s cover image, we see Madonna shedding her early identification with the tender comedic vulnerability of Marilyn Monroe and Judy Holliday. She has become a sophisticated, world-weary Marlene Dietrich, a cynical dominatrix of Prussian discipline.”

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  Tom Chiarella, “The Problem with Boys,” Esquire, July 2006. Paglia: “The masculine impulse is limits testing, even self-destructive. We don’t want to extinguish it. In the age of terrorism, who will defend us? Young jihadists sure aren’t tempering their masculinity. Americans are in unilateral gender disarmament.”

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  Paglia, “Marie Antoinette Ascendant,” The Chronicle Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, September 22, 2006. Review of new books, a Hollywood movie, and a PBS documentary on Marie Antoinette. “The Marie Antoinette story, with its premonitions of doom amid a giddy fatalism, seems to signal a pervasive guilt about near-intractable social inequities.” Reprinted in The San Francisco Chronicle, October 8, 2006.

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  Mark Adnum, interview, “Cruising with Camille,” Bright Lights Film Journal, outrate.net, November 1, 2006. MA: Oliver Stone once said that every gay man thinks they’re a film critic, and Quentin Crisp said that he went to the movies “incessantly and reverently.” Yet, as far as I know there’s no particularly deep relationship between cinema and lesbian culture. How would you account for this?

  CP: I noticed this odd phenomenon while I was still in college. I had a community of response to film with gay men but virtually zero with lesbians. It’s partly why my dating life was such a frustrating blank! My theory is that gay men, unlike lesbians, have an innate, hyper-acute visual sense. It’s related to what I have speculated to be the genesis of much (but not all) male homosexuality: an artistic gene that ends up isolating sensitive young boys and interfering at a crucial moment with the harsh dynamics of schoolyard male bonding.

  I loved Cruising—while everyone else was furiously condemning it. It had an underground decadence that wasn’t that different from The Story of O or other European high porn of the 1960s. I bought the Cruising soundtrack, which was really radical for its time, and played it for years….The gay opposition to Cruising prefigured the dismayingly Stalinist gay and feminist picketing of Basic Instinct—in which Sharon Stone created one of the most indelible, charismatic dominatrixes of all time. It’s why I was so pleased to be invited to do the audio commentary for the DVD of Basic Instinct (which I recorded in a Philadelphia studio famed for its old soul and disco hits).” [The recording session for the 1996 DVD was in the historic Sigma Sound Studios, where David Bowie had recorded several tracks with producer Luther Vandross for Young Americans.]

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  “Camille Paglia Says Madonna Gave Britney the ‘Kiss of Death,’ ” US magazine, December 8, 2006. Paglia: “A great promise was contained in the moment when Madonna kissed Britney [Spears] at the MTV Awards. She in a sense was saying, ‘I’m passing the torch to you.’ It was a fabulous moment. Britney looked toned, in control of her career, and it was up to her to take the next step. Literally from that kiss, from that moment onward, Britney has spiraled out of control. It’s like Madonna gave her the kiss of death! Britney is throwing it away!”

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  Roundtable tributes to Betty Friedan (after her death), Entertainment Weekly, year-end special, December 29, 2006–January 5, 2007. Paglia: “Betty Friedan wasn’t afraid to be called ‘abrasive.’ She pursued her feminist principles with a flamboyant pugnacity that has become all too rare in these yuppified times. She hated girliness and bourgeois decorum and never lost her earthy ethnicity.”

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  Paglia, “What I See in the Mirror” (recurring feature), The Guardian Weekend Supplement, January 6, 2007. “When I look in the mirror, I’m glad to see anything at all. Shrinkage is one of the more outrageous aspects of aging….Unlike Susan Sontag and Germaine Greer—tall, majestic, and commanding every eye—I’ve always been small and nondescript….‘Dimples are death,’ a gay fellow confided darkly to me in college. Alas, his dire prophecy has proved all too true….Fortunately, my earliest fond memories are of bossy, hyperkinetic old Italian widows with sun-crinkled faces. Hence it’s probably no coincidence that my lifetime idol is Keith Richards, that piratical pioneer of the weathered look.”

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  Paglia, column, in conversation with Ingrid Sischy about Paglia’s “worship” of Elizabeth Taylor during the Doris Day–Debbie Reynolds era. In cover story package on Taylor, Interview magazine, February 2007.

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  Paglia, “Wonder Women: Camille Paglia on Dames Who Rise to the Top,” The Globe and Mail, March 24, 2007. “Why can’t a woman…As more and more strong women rise to the top of the political world, Camille Paglia ponders the paradigms of power and gender.” Reprinted in The San Francisco Chronicle as “Women Warriors: From Hedda to Hillary—the long struggle for power, success,” April 8, 2007.

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  Paglia, Salon.com column, April 11, 2007. Response to reader question about global warming. “As a native of upstate New York, whose dramatic landscape was carved by the receding North American glacier 10,000 years ago, I have been contemplating the principle of climate change since I was a child. Niagara Falls, as well as the even bigger dry escarpment of Clark Reservation near Syracuse, is a memento left by the glacier. So is nearby Green Lakes State Park, with its mysteriously deep glacial pools. When I was ten, I lived with my family at the foot of a drumlin—a long, undulating hill of moraine formed by eddies of the ancient glacier melt.

  “Geology and meteorology are fields that have always interested me and that I might well have entered, had I not been more attracted to art and culture. (My geology professor in college, in fact, asked me to consider g
eology as a career.) To conflate vast time-frames with volatile daily change is a sublime exercise, bordering on the metaphysical.

  “However, I am a skeptic about what is currently called global warming. I have been highly suspicious for years about the political agenda that has slowly accrued around this issue. As a lapsed Catholic, I detest dogma in any area….From my perspective, virtually all of the major claims about global warming and its causes still remain to be proved.

  “Climate change, keyed to solar cycles, is built into earth’s system. Cooling and warming will go on forever. Slowly rising sea levels will at some point doubtless flood Lower Manhattan and seaside houses everywhere from Cape Cod to Florida—as happened to Native American encampments on those very shores. Human habitation is always fragile and provisional. People will migrate for the hills, as they have always done.