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Paglia, “My Fair Lady: As a blockbuster exhibition celebrating Audrey Hepburn prepares to open, Camille Paglia explores the enduring allure of the icon of screen and style,” The Sunday Times Magazine (U.K.), June 7, 2015. Commissioned to mark the launch of an exhibition of photographs of Audrey Hepburn at the National Portrait Gallery in London. Paglia says that, like Leslie Caron, Hepburn “represented a new type of postwar woman—a pert, buoyant, charmingly mischievous boy/girl with wispy cropped hair.” She “started a raffish line that ran from Jean Seberg to Edie Sedgwick, Twiggy, and the waif-like Mia Farrow. It was a transition to the cheeky, coltish, and more defiant free spirits of the 1960s, such as Julie Christie and Ali MacGraw.”
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Editor-in-Chief David Daley, The Salon Interview with Camille Paglia, Part One, Salon.com, July 28, 2015. Paglia: “Right from the start, when the Bill Cosby scandal surfaced, I knew it was not going to bode well for Hillary’s campaign, because young women today have a much lower threshold for tolerance of these matters. The horrible truth is that the feminist establishment in the U.S., led by Gloria Steinem, did in fact apply a double standard to Bill Clinton’s behavior because he was a Democrat. The Democratic president and administration supported abortion rights, and therefore it didn’t matter what his personal behavior was.
“But we’re living in a different time right now, and young women have absolutely no memory of Bill Clinton. It’s like ancient history for them; there’s no reservoir of accumulated good will. And the actual facts of the matter are that Bill Clinton was a serial abuser of working-class women—he had exploited that power differential even in Arkansas. And then in the case of Monica Lewinsky—I mean, the failure on the part of Gloria Steinem and company to protect her was an absolute disgrace in feminist history! What bigger power differential could there be than between the president of the United States and this poor innocent girl? Not only an intern but clearly a girl who had a kind of pleading, open look to her—somebody who was looking for a father figure.
“I was enraged! My publicly stated opinion at the time was that I don’t care what public figures do in their private life. It’s a very sophisticated style among the French, and generally in Europe, where the heads of state tend to have mistresses on the side. So what? That doesn’t bother me at all! But the point is, they are sophisticated affairs that the European politicians have, while the Clinton episode was a disgrace….
“In most of these cases, like the Bill Clinton and Bill Cosby stories, there’s been a complete neglect of psychology. We’re in a period right now where nobody asks any questions about psychology. No one has any feeling for human motivation. No one talks about sexuality in terms of emotional needs and symbolism and the legacy of childhood. Sexuality has been politicized—‘Don’t ask any questions!’ ‘No discussion!’ ‘Gay is exactly equivalent to straight!’ And thus in this period of psychological blindness or inertness, our art has become dull. There’s nothing interesting being written—in fiction or plays or movies. Everything is boring because of our failure to ask psychological questions.
“So I say there is a big parallel between Bill Cosby and Bill Clinton—aside from their initials! Young feminists need to understand that this abusive behavior by powerful men signifies their sense that female power is much bigger than they are! These two people, Clinton and Cosby, are emotionally infantile—they’re engaged in a war with female power. It has something to do with their early sense of being smothered by female power—and this pathetic, abusive, and criminal behavior is the result of their sense of inadequacy.
“Now, in order to understand that, people would have to read my first book, Sexual Personae—which of course is far too complex for the ordinary feminist or academic mind! It’s too complex because it requires a sense of the ambivalence of human life. Everything is not black and white, for heaven’s sake! We are formed by all kinds of strange or vague memories from childhood. That kind of understanding is needed to see that Cosby was involved in a symbiotic, push-pull thing with his wife, where he went out and did these awful things to assert his own independence. But for that, he required the women to be inert. He needed them to be dead! Cosby is actually a necrophiliac—a style that was popular in the late-Victorian period in the nineteenth century.
“It’s hard to believe now, but you had men digging up corpses from graveyards, stealing the bodies, hiding them under their beds, and then having sex with them. So that’s exactly what’s happening here: to give a woman a drug, to make her inert, to make her dead is the man saying that I need her to be dead for me to function. She’s too powerful for me as a living woman. And this is what is also going on in those barbaric fraternity orgies, where women are sexually assaulted while lying unconscious. And women don’t understand this! They have no idea why any men would find it arousing to have sex with a young woman who’s passed out at a fraternity house. But it’s necrophilia—this fear and envy of a woman’s power.
“And it’s the same thing with Bill Clinton: to find the answer, you have to look at his relationship to his flamboyant mother. He felt smothered by her in some way. But let’s be clear—I’m not trying to blame the mother! What I’m saying is that male sexuality is extremely complicated, and the formation of male identity is very tentative and sensitive—but feminist rhetoric doesn’t allow for it. This is why women are having so much trouble dealing with men in the feminist era. They don’t understand men, and they demonize men. They accord to men far more power than men actually have in sex. Women control the sexual world in ways that most feminists simply don’t understand.
“My explanation is that second-wave feminism dispensed with motherhood. The ideal woman was the career woman—and I do support that. To me, the mission of feminism is to remove all barriers to women’s advancement in the social and political realm—to give women equal opportunities with men. However, what I kept saying in Sexual Personae is that equality in the workplace is not going to solve the problems between men and women which are occurring in the private, emotional realm, where every man is subordinate to women, because he emerged as a tiny helpless thing from a woman’s body. Professional women today don’t want to think about this or deal with it.
“The erasure of motherhood from feminist rhetoric has led us to this current politicization of sex talk, which doesn’t allow women to recognize their immense power vis-à-vis men. When motherhood was more at the center of culture, you had mothers who understood the fragility of boys and the boy’s need for nurturance and for confidence to overcome his weaknesses. The old-style country women—the Italian matriarchs and Jewish mothers—they all understood the fragility of men. The mothers ruled their own world and didn’t take men that seriously. They understood how to nurture men and encourage them to be strong—whereas current feminism simply doesn’t perceive the power of women vis-à-vis men. But when you talk like this with most men, it really resonates with them, and they say ‘Yes, yes! That’s it!’
“Currently, feminists lack sympathy and compassion for men and for the difficulties that men face in the formation of their identities. I’m not talking in terms of the men’s rights movement, which got infected by p.c. The heterosexual professional woman, emerging with her shiny Ivy League degree, wants to communicate with her husband exactly the way she communicates with her friends—as in Sex and the City. That show really caught the animated way that women actually talk with each other. But that’s not a style that straight men can do! Gay men can do it, sure—but not straight men! Guess what—women are different than men! When will feminism wake up to this basic reality? Women relate differently to each other than they do to men. And straight men do not have the same communication skills or values as women—their brains are different!
“Wherever I go to speak, whether it’s Brazil or Italy or Norway, I find that upper-middle-class professional women are very unhappy. This is a global problem! And it’s coming from the fact that wom
en are expecting men to provide them with the same kind of emotional and conversational support and intimacy that they get from their women friends. And when they don’t get it, they’re full of resentment and bitterness. It’s tragic!
“Women are blaming men for a genuine problem that I say is systemic. It has to do with the transition from the old, agrarian culture to this urban professional culture, where women don’t have that big support network that they had in the countryside. All four of my grandparents and my mother were born in Italy. In the small country towns they came from, the extended family was the rule, and the women were a force unto themselves. Women had a chatty group solidarity as they did chores all day and took care of children and the elderly. Men and women never had that much to do with each other over history! There was the world of men and the world of women. Now we’re working side by side in offices at the same job.
“Women want to leave at the end of the day and have a happy marriage at home, but then they put all this pressure on men because they expect them to be exactly like their female friends. If they feel restlessness or misery or malaise, they automatically blame it on men. Men are not doing enough; men aren’t sharing enough. But it’s not the fault of men that we have this crazy and rather neurotic system where women are now functioning like men in the workplace, with all its material rewards. A huge problem here is that in America, we have identified ourselves totally with our work lives. In most parts of Southern Europe, on the other hand, work is secondary to your real life. It’s often said that Americans live to work, as opposed to working to live.”
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Editor-in-Chief David Daley, The Salon Interview with Camille Paglia, Part Two, Salon.com, July 29, 2015. Daley asks about Donald Trump (six months before the presidential primaries). Paglia: “Well, my view of Trump began in the negative. When he was still relatively unknown nationally, he jackhammered a magnificent Art Deco sculpture over the main doorway of the Bonwit Teller department store on 5th Avenue. It was 1980, and he was demolishing the store to build Trump Tower. The Metropolitan Museum of Art had offered to take the sculpture, but Trump got impatient and just had it destroyed. I still remember that vividly, and I’m never going to forget it! I regard Donald Trump as an art vandal, equivalent to ISIS destroying ancient Assyrian sculptures. As a public figure, however, Trump is something of a carnival barker….He has no political skills of any kind. He’s simply an American citizen who is creating his own bully pulpit. He speaks in the great populist way, in the slangy vernacular. He takes hits like a comedian….Like claiming John McCain isn’t a war hero, because his kind of war hero doesn’t get captured—that’s hilarious! That’s like something crass that Lenny Bruce might have said! It’s so startling and entertaining.”
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Scott M. MacDonald, Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department 1967–77 (2015). Paglia interviewed about the enormous impact on her of the Harpur Film Society during her college years (1964–68) at Harpur College.
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Michael Harvey, “Interview: Talking leadership with Camille Paglia,” Leadership and the Humanities 3, no. 2, September 2015.
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Roundtable, “The Female Gaze: 100 overlooked films directed by women,” cover story, Sight & Sound (U.K.), October 2015. Paglia nominates Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts (1986): “Although it has become a cult classic due to its explicit lesbian sex, Desert Hearts is a wonderfully well-made film with a host of appealing attributes. Steeped in moody, classic country-and-western music, it conveys romantic longing and confusion with bittersweet intensity. The casting is superb, starting with Helen Shaver as a primly proper New York professor and Patricia Charbonneau as a charismatic Reno cowgirl, but also extending to a riveting supporting cast, who do humorous, sharply observed vignettes across the spectrum of social class. Crisply edited subplots are effortlessly woven throughout. The gritty, monotonous sense of place is accentuated by Shaver’s endearing disorientation in wide-open Nevada. The film has a beguilingly hypnotic atmosphere, like Shakespeare’s magical green world, where things change shape and identities are transformed. As we contemplate the aching degrees and varieties of love, we must laugh at the eternal muddle of human aspiration and absurdity. With neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Desert Hearts charmingly asserts the centrality of emotion, as well as its prankish surprises.”
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Paglia, “Camille Paglia Takes on Taylor Swift, Hollywood’s #GirlSquad Culture,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 10, 2015. “Can group selfies advance women’s goals?” Commissioned for THR’s annual Women in Entertainment issue. Paglia: “Do girl squads signal the blossoming of an idealistic new feminism, where empowering solidarity will replace mean-girl competitiveness? Hollywood has always shrewdly known that cat-fighting makes great box office. In classic films such as The Women, All About Eve, The Group, and Valley of the Dolls, all-star female casts romped in claws-out bitchfests. That flamboyant, fur-flying formula remains vital today in Bravo TV’s boffo Real Housewives series, with its avid global following.
“A warmer model of female friendship was embodied in Aaron Spelling’s blockbuster Charlie’s Angels TV show, which was denounced by feminists as a ‘tits-and-ass’ parade but was in fact an effervescent action-adventure showing smart, bold women working side by side in fruitful collaboration. A similar dynamic of affectionate intimacy animated HBO’s Sex and the City, whose four feisty, mutually supportive professional women prefigured today’s fun-loving but rawly ambitious girl squads….
“Young women performers are now at the mercy of a swarming, intrusive paparazzi culture, intensified by the hypersexualization of our flesh-baring fashions. The girl squad phenomenon has certainly been magnified by how isolated and exposed young women feel in negotiating the piranha shoals of the industry….Given the professional stakes, girl squads must not slide into a cozy, cliquish retreat from romantic fiascoes or communication problems with men, whom feminist rhetoric too often rashly stereotypes as oafish pigs. If many women feel lonely or overwhelmed these days, it’s not due to male malice. Women have lost the natural solidarity and companionship they enjoyed for thousands of years in the preindustrial agrarian world, where multiple generations chatted through the day as they shared chores, cooking, and child care.
“In our wide-open modern era of independent careers, girl squads can help women advance if they avoid presenting a silly, regressive public image—as in the tittering, tongues-out mugging of Swift’s bear-hugging posse. Swift herself should retire that obnoxious Nazi Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props, an exhibitionistic overkill that Lara Marie Schoenhals brilliantly parodied in her scathing viral video ‘Please Welcome to the Stage’….
“Women need to study the immensely productive dynamic of male bonding in history. With their results-oriented teamwork, men largely have escaped the sexual jealousy, emotionalism, and spiteful turf wars that sometimes dog women. If women in Hollywood seek a broad audience, they must aim higher and transcend a narrow gender factionalism that thrives on grievance. Girl squads are only an early learning stage of female development. For women to leave a lasting mark on culture, they need to cut down on the socializing and focus like a laser on their own creative gifts.”
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Todd Leopold, “Camille Paglia Rips Taylor Swift for ‘Nazi Barbie Routine,’ Frenzy Follows,” CNN.com, December 11, 2015. Paglia’s passing reference to Taylor Swift the prior day in The Hollywood Reporter sets off an international furor. “Taylor Swift an ‘obnoxious Nazi Barbie,’ writes Camille Paglia,” headlined The Guardian, as did The Daily Mail, which assured its readers that “Taylor Swift has no affiliation with the Nazi party.” The Sydney Morning Herald and The Times of Israel reported that the chairman of the Australian B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission, invoking the Holocaust, called Paglia’s comments “obscene and insensitive” and demanded that she apologize. Paglia, bemused at this wave of g
lobal literalism, of course rejected all policing of satiric metaphors.
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Editor-in-Chief David Daley, interview, “ ‘A Bold, Knowing, Charismatic Creature Neither Male nor Female’: Camille Paglia remembers a hero, David Bowie. Bowie named Paglia’s Sexual Personae one of his favorite books. But he helped inspire her to write it.” Salon.com, January 12, 2016 (two days after Bowie’s death).
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Paglia, “Hillary’s Blame-Men-First Feminism May Prove Costly in 2016,” Salon.com, January 27, 2016. “During her two presidential campaigns, Hillary Clinton has consistently drawn greater support from women than men. Is this gender lag due to retrograde misogyny, or does Hillary project an uneasiness or ambivalence about men that complicates her appeal to a broader electorate?” This piece was commissioned by the op-ed department of The New York Times but rejected within hours of its submission. It was published by Salon.com the following morning and immediately became the lead item on the Drudge Report—a good example of how the Web has facilitated free speech and thwarted the gatekeepers of the once omnipotent media establishment.
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