by Hooks, Bell
Their refusal even to acknowledge the existence of progressive feminist thought about sex and sexuality allows them to sensationalize these issues even as they effectively use the image of the “do-me” feminists to assault the many women who stand against patriarchy and phallocentrism. Esquire magazine goes to great lengths to place me in the “do-me” category precisely because many sexist men remain unable to accept that women (and our male allies) who repudiate patriarchy assert sexual agency in new and exciting ways that are mutually humanizing and satisfying. It has always served the interest of the patriarchal status quo for men to represent the feminist woman as antisex and antimale. Even though the real lives of women active in feminist movement never conformed to this representation, it continues to prevail in the popular imagination because the subjugated knowledge that embracing feminism intensifies sexual pleasure for men and women in this society, no matter our sexual practice, is dangerous information. Too many folks might want to convert to feminist thought if they knew firsthand the powerful and passionate positive transformation it would create in every area of their sexual lives. It is better for patriarchy to try and make us believe that the only real sex available to feminist women who like men must be negotiated using the same old patriarchal modes of seduction that are perpetually unsatisfying to all women.
Patriarchal publications can successfully push this propagandistic message, as the Esquire issue does, precisely because powerful discussions of feminism and sexuality are not taking place continually, everywhere. Talking sex in meta-language and theoretical prose does not capture the imagination of masses of folks who are working daily to understand how their lives have been affected by shifting gender roles and expectations and how sexism fucks us all up, folks who just want to know what feminism is really all about and whether or not it can rescue us from the abyss of loneliness and sexual death. Living as we do in an anti-sex culture, with patriarchy as the most well organized and institutionalized attack on our sexual agency and imaginations, it is downright perverse and frightening that the mass media can convince anyone that feminism is the cause of women turning away from men or from heterosexual sex. Heterosexual women turned on by feminist movement learn how to move away from sexually dead encounters with patriarchal men who eroticize exploitative power and domination scenarios that in no way embrace female sexual agency, but these women do so not to give up sex but to make sex new, different, liberatory, and fun. Lack of critical vigilance within feminist movement made everyone unmindful of the ongoing need to document this shift positively. Were many more of us documenting our sex lives in art, literature, film and other media, there would be an abundance of counter-hegemonic evidence to disprove the popular sexist stereotype that women in feminist movement are antisex and antimen. By conceding the turf of sexuality to the phallocentric sexist media, feminists—whether liberal or radical—become complicit with conservative repression of public discourse of sexuality. If nothing else, articles such as the Esquire piece should serve as pointed reminders that radical/revolutionary feminists must always keep alive a dynamic public discussion of sexuality.
Collectively, many feminists stopped talking about sex publicly because such talk exposed not only our differences, our contradictions, it revealed that we had not yet produced visionary models of liberatory sexuality that fully reconciled issues of power and domination with our will to end systemic, sexist sexual exploitation and oppression. As the feminist pro-sex collective voice retreated into silence, sometimes pushed into the background by the puritanical violence of antisex conservative gender rights propaganda, the individual voices of narrowly focused thinkers like privileged white law professor Catharine MacKinnon, to give just one example, claimed to represent feminist perspectives on sexuality. Only folks outside feminist movement accept these voices as representative, yet these voices continue to speak the feminist speech that the mass media most wants to hear. It delights in the sound of these voices because they are easier to belittle, make fun of, and finally dismiss. Obviously one-dimensional and often ruthlessly dogmatic, these voices are usually antisex, antipleasure, utterly lacking in humor. They deny the reality of contradictions and insist on an unattainable perfectionism in human behavior. It is no wonder, then, that the public voices of puritanical, reformist feminism turn most folks off. However, we do not effectively counter the negative impact of this message by embracing out-moded sexist visions of female sexual agency and pleasure.
I hear nothing sexually open or radical in the statement attributed to Lisa Palac in Esquire, who declares “I say to men, ‘Okay, pretend you’re a burglar and you’ve broken in here and you throw me down on the bed and make me suck your cock!’ They’re horrified—it goes against all they’ve been taught: No, no, it would degrade you! Exactly. Degrade me when I ask you to.’” The eroticization of sex as degradation, especially dick-sucking, and the equation of that chosen “degradation” with pleasure is merely an unimaginative reworking of stale patriarchal, pornographic fantasies that do not become more exciting or liberatory if women are the agents of their projection and realization. Most of the women quoted in Esquire display a lack of sexual imagination, since they primarily conceive of sexual agency only by inverting the patriarchal standpoint and claiming it as their own. Their comments were so pathetically male-identified that it was scary to think that readers might actually be convinced they were an expression of feminist, female, sexual agency. However, they were intended to excite the male imagination, and no doubt many men get off fantasizing that the feminist sexual revolution would not really change anything, just make it easier for everybody to occupy the space of the patriarchal phallic imaginary.
No doubt it was just such a moment of ecstatic masturbatory reverie that led Tad Friend to declare: “The do-me feminists are choosing locker-room talk to shift discussion from the failures of men to the failures of feminism, from the paradigm of sexual abuse to the paradigm of sexual pleasure.” This kind of either/or binary thinking mirrors the narrowminded dogmatic thinking it claims to critique. Revolutionary feminism does not focus on the failures of men, but rather on the violence of patriarchy and the pain of sexist exploitation and oppression. It calls out sexual abuse to transform the space of the erotic so that sexual pleasure can be sustained and ongoing, so that female agency can exist as an inalienable right. Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.
7
CAMILLE PAGLIA
“Black” pagan or white colonizer?
An editor and reader of my work laments that not enough folks read me, know who I am. But she confesses, “It has to do in part with the academic way you write! Why, if you just let yourself go, you could be the black Camille Paglia!” This statement kept me laughing throughout the day. Though full of sass and wit, Paglia’s Sexual Personae is tediously academic. (And no doubt as unread by mainstream readers as most other English department literary criticism). Many books bought nowadays remain unopened, bought not for their ideas but because the hype surrounding the author entices. That’s why I give my own awards each year to “The Most Bought Least Read Books.” So far, I know of no studies done to see how writers feel when they have a mega-financial success with a work that for the most part goes unread.
Who knows, then, what it means for me to strive to become the “black Camille Paglia”? Maybe it would make me a more powerful voice in popular culture. Like RuPaul, I could come to fame “working” mainstream culture’s hunger for representations of black folks that repudiate the notion “it’s a white thing, you wouldn’t understand.” It’s a deep thing to live in a culture where folks get off on the image of a big black man trying to look and act like a little white woman (a version of Dolly Parton’s petite retrograde femininity complete with big blond hair). Or, for another take o
n the same phenomenon, there is the example of model Naomi Campbell being more than rewarded for giving up her naturally beautiful black looks for the joys of being a white woman wannabe. If only I could have long straight hair—blond, strawberry blond, red, light brown, any kind of dead, white-girl hair will do. If only. No doubt about it: in the marketplace of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the yellow brick road leading to black power in the mainstream can only be traveled by those who are throwing shade and shedding skin all the way—by those who are ready to be, as the novel put it, “black no more.” This is a piece about why I ain’t even interested in appearing as though I would even think about wanting to be “the black Camille Paglia.”
To begin with, I need to make it clear to those who don’t know that the throwing-shade, dissin’, “reading” style that carried Miss Camille to fame was a persona she assembled after years of ethnographically studying the mannerisms of vernacular black culture, especially black gay sub-culture, and most especially the culture of the black queen. And girlfriend ain’t even ashamed about this background, not at all embarrassed to say shit like:
My mentors have always been Jews, Harold Bloom and so on, and they’re the only ones who can tolerate my personality! But at any rate, when I got to Yale … whoa! Culture shock! Because I saw the way the WASP establishment had the Ivy League in a death grip. In order to rise in academe, you have to adopt this WASP Style. It’s very laid-back. Now, I really can’t do it, but I call it “walking on eggs at a funeral home.” Now I’m loud. Did you notice? I’m very loud. I’ve had a hell of a time in academe. This is why I usually get along with African Americans. I mean, when we’re together, “Whooo!” It’s like I feel totally myself—we just let everything go!
Naturally, all black Americans were more than pleased to have Miss Camille give us this vote of confidence, since we live to make it possible for white girls like herself to have a place where they can be “totally” themselves.
Throughout her work, Miss Camille unabashedly articulates white cultural imperialist representations of her beloved neo-primitive darkies, sharing profound tidbits such as “we don’t need Derrida, we have Aretha.” Or, “In my opinion, the most powerful energetic personalities in America are not WASPS but blacks, Jews, and gays, all of whom are in combat with larger, perhaps unconquerable historical forces.” And she can even get downright Afrocentric when she wants to and just let it all hang. “The whole racial argument about the canon falls to nothing when it is seen that the origins of Greek Apollonianism were in Egypt, in Africa. Go down, Moses: even Judeo-Christianity sojourned in Egypt.” Go, Miss Camille. Just appropriate that “difference” and go with it! Go, girl!
Come to think of it, not only is Miss Camille working the positive tip of transgressive black sub-culture, she really took some “how to get ahead and succeed on TV” lessons from Shahrazad Ali! The mix of sassy dissin’ witty radical “reads” with straight-ahead conservative-speak spices things up in just the way that makes it the kind of border-crossing cultural criticism everybody can groove on. Even though it does seem that radical chic was absorbed by the rearticulation of mainstream, white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values. I mean girlfriend bashed feminism left, right, and center telling us “current feminism” was “in a reactionary phase of hysterical moralism and prudery, like that of the Temperance movement a century ago.” And when it came down to really talking about changing canons and curricula and divesting of some white supremacy, all Miss Camille could say was, “African Americans must study the language and structure of Western public power while still preserving their cultural identity, which has had world impact on the arts.” Oh, we so hurt! Miss Camille, you mean all you think we can do is dance and sing? We read and write now, yes, ma’am.
Paglia never mentions the critical writing of any African American. And even her dissin’ diatribe on Anita Hill never used that offensive word “black” since “What’s race gotta do with it?” is top of the charts among the crowd that agrees with Miss Camille that the hearings were “one of the most powerful moments I have witnessed on television.” In defense of a real life Mister—but certainly aping Alice Walker’s color purple style— she proclaims, “Giving birth to himself, Thomas reenacted his own credo of the self-made man.” When it came down to it, Miss Camille was not at all into changing or challenging the status quo. Girlfriend just wanted to be right there in the middle of that white supremacist capitalist patriarchal stage doing her thing. Go, girl! You got it! It’s all yours!
The spotlight that the white male-dominated, racist, and sexist mass media turned on Camille Paglia has begun to dim. The lights are dimming not because she has ceased to be witty, stopped her sensational sound bites, or is any less stridently passionate in her trashing of feminism, but because the seductive young are on her turf, competing and claiming air time. Without Paglia as trailblazer and symbolic mentor, there would be no cultural limelight for white girls such as Katie Roiphe and Naomi Wolf. And no matter how hard they work to put that Oedipal distance between their writing and hers, they are singing the same tune on way too many things. And (dare I say it?) that tune always seems to be a jazzed-up version of “The Way We Were”—you know, the good old days before feminism and multiculturalism and the unbiased curriculum fucked everything up. Come to think of it, Miss Camille was among the first white male-appointed female voices to proclaim that “we need a new kind of feminism, one that stresses personal responsibility and is open to art and sex in all their dark, unconsoling mysteries. The feminist of the fin de siècle will be bawdy, streetwise, and on-the-spot confrontational, in the prankish, sixties ways.” Never mind that many living feminists personify all this. Our problem is that we are just fast, fresh girls that Paglia does not know—and if she did she would pretend not to, ’cause recognizing us would mean that much of what she has to say about feminism would be exposed for what it is: the stuff of sexist fantasy. This is not to say there is no basis in reality use for her critique, only that the basis is small and does not represent any feminist norm. Paglia, like those who come in her wake, chooses easy targets. She calls out the conservative crowd, the antimale, antisex, close-your-skirts-and-cross-your-legs, gender- equality-with-men-of-their-class, reformist, professional girls she knew up close and personal.
Sass and sarcasm aside, it has been tremendously difficult for radical/revolutionary feminist thinkers to intervene in the mass media’s tendency to project conservative feminist thought as representative. At the same time, it has been all too easy for that same media to provide massive amounts of air time to self-proclaimed “feminist” spokespersons, such as Paglia, who not only confirm this representation but counter it with their own eclectic and sometimes even bizarre prescriptions for future feminist movement. Significantly, Paglia and her followers make feminism most palatable when they strip it of any radical political agenda that would include a critique of sexism and a call to dismantle patriarchy, repackaging it so that it is finally only about gender equality with men of their class in the public sphere. No matter the skill with which Paglia consistently argues that women are different from men, more body than mind, more emotional than rational, and so on; in her reactionary introductory chapter to Sexual Personae, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art,” she is not so retrograde as to want to do away with equal access to the privileged spheres of careers, money, and power even though that access exists as a consequence of the militant feminist work she downgrades or ignores. Sadly, radical/revolutionary feminist thinkers have been unable to intervene strategically and alter the public understanding of feminism that audiences receive from the messages of Paglia. Such an intervention is necessary. Paglia would never have been able to publicly cast herself as a feminist activist, even with the support of the male-dominated mass media, if there had existed an organized radical/revolutionary feminist movement.
Even though we have many powerful individual spokes-persons who educate for critical consciousness, teaching feminist thought and practi
ce, we have lost an organized base from which to project revolutionary agendas. The most organized segment of feminist movement is the reformist conservative/liberal strain. From the onset of contemporary feminist movement, this segment has lobbied for equal access in the public sphere, primarily in the work arena. And as I and other progressive thinkers have written, a changing national and global economy created a context where it was in the class and race interests of privileged white men to accept the disruption of gender roles in the public sphere. Hence, economic shifts have been as much a factor in creating a cultural climate for disruption of gender roles as has feminist movement. Now that that disruption has been relatively successful, there is no need for folks to lobby publicly for the inclusion of women in the work force—that is now the norm. And now that it is also evident that such inclusion will not lead to the displacement and disruption of patriarchal, white male power, the site of feminist struggle is shifting to the issue of power and control in the sphere of domestic relationships between males and females.